I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.
The best bands kept making records and had this evolution, where by the end, by their commercial phase or sellout phase, the records are from outer space.
Whether it's an $11 flip-flop or a $2 key ring or a $2,000 dress, they're all done with integrity. They're all done with a design sense. As long as the creativity exists, then I don't think it's a sellout. A sellout is putting your name on any piece of crap and then expecting people to buy it because it's got your name on it.
When you get fat and lose your hunger. That is when you know the sellout has happened.
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.
You hit a certain age and - especially because of TV - the young cooks coming up say, 'You're a sellout, because you're doing something other than what you should be doing.' 'Top Chef' is a double-edged sword for me: There's a whole group of people who will not come to the restaurants because they assume I'm not in them anymore, all I do is TV.
Since I became part of the zeitgeist, I've been called a sellout many times.
It is not possible to assert publicly that Monsanto is anything other than venal without being accused of being a sellout, a fraud, or worse.
Most of the people who call me a sellout were 7 when I was down face-first in the punk trenches.
You make something, and you really have fun with it, and you try to put emotion in it, and at the end of the day, you have no idea how the tide is going to fall. You don't know if everyone's going to like it, if everyone's going to hate it, if it's going to be like you're a media darling, or all of a sudden you're a sellout. You have no idea.