Trent Reznor

In 2010, aside from that niche of music that I have no interest in - Black Eyed Peas territory, disposable pop stuff - there's almost an incentive to go back to making music as adventurous and groundbreaking as you can, because nobody gets a big hit anymore.

When I'm on stage, the songs that we've chosen to play from the back catalog are things that still resonate with me, and matter to me. And the songs that I couldn't be a part of, we don't play anymore.

It's one thing to sit back and say, 'Hey let's play a club, that will be great,' but then you get there and say, 'Hey wait, this is the dressing room? Where's my dressing room?'

Downward Spiral' felt like I had an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing inside me and I had to somehow challenge something or I'd explode. I thought I could get through by putting everything into my music, standing in front of an audience and screaming emotions at them from my guts.

You're standing onstage in a sold-out arena with people singing your music, and you feel like the loneliest person in the world. Because here's a party that, essentially, it's for you. And you still somehow feel like you don't belong there. Those people all have their lives and go back home.

The music I always liked as a kid was stuff I could bum out to and realize, 'Hey, someone else feels that way, too.' So if someone can do that with my music, it's mission accomplished.

I like the idea of subversively communicating with people... so that you make people see things in different ways.

Being a rock & roll star has become as legitimate a career option as being an astronaut or a policeman or a fireman.

When I return to the writing process after being away from it for a while, the first part of it always is being honest with myself: What am I into right now? Is it rock bands and guitars, is it noise, is it dance beats and electronics? Is it space, is it clutter?

A lot of what I've done as Nine Inch Nails has been governed by fear. I was trying to keep the songs in a framework that was tough, and I learnt a lot from Jesus and Mary Chain about how to bury nice pop songs in unlistenable noise - the idea being if you can get behind that wall, you find there's a pearl inside.

What I was concerned about when I wrote the 'Downward Spiral' record was being a self-centred destructive force. The point was tearing down everything in a search for something else.

I like the idea of working in an album-sized chunk, you know, and I never looked at Nine Inch Nails as a project that would be a hit-driven, single-based kind of thing.