[in 2011] Nobody sells records any more. Even the hottest bands aren't selling anything. We were never in this business to sell records anyway.

It was impossible for people to see new records in their own light. We understand that, of course. Everyone is going to compare your work to your earlier work. Especially in the case of rock'n'roll, the music that matters most to everyone is the music that they were listening to when they were becoming their formed selves. The band that you loved when you were 16 to 28 is never going to affect you in the same way when you're 45 or 50.

REM will continue to exist. It's like the past never goes away. There will be reissues, and we'll have to worry about extra content, so it's not like REM never existed. It'll still be something going forward, it just won't be a recording or touring entity.

Peter enjoys collaborating with people and I see him doing a lot more of that. I think Michael wants to work with visual media - sculpture and photography.

We were as on top of our game as we could be after 31 years, and we said walk away on our own terms.

As an alternative to the synthesizer-dominated electronic music that was being made, we were the most visible sign that something else was going on.

On the 1994 album Monster: "We figured we had done the acoustic thing about as well as we were ever going to do it... we said, 'We have guitars, we have amplifiers, let's make a rock record.'"