Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by James Murphy - Page 2

Ad Rock from the Beastie Boys gave me a present: it's a boombox with a keyboard and a beatbox in it. You can't make that up.

Sound sounds are terrible in the city, but it's great to listen and to walk and listen to people talk to each other. There are birds. You hear spring. I like listening to the city.

I don't have a TV, and I don't have a radio.

I think that not being all that overwhelmed by good reviews is a luxury. I'm like a rich person who says he doesn't care about money.

There are some people who are just plain great at making music. That's not who I am.

With a computer, you have access to so many drum sounds and samples that your snare drum will be unrelated harmonically to your kick drum.

I don't think I've ever made a claim to startling originality.

I think I'm designed to regret everything.

I write songs all the time. Sometimes they're just weird songs I sing while changing a baby, or songs about annoying things that I sing to myself, or to friends while sitting at a bar, or about Christmas or New York.

I am kind of, by definition, a hipster.

You can buy $20,000 speakers, but put them in a room that's not right, and it sounds terrible. If you buy $20 speakers and put them in a room that's tuned right, it'll sound great.

I'm a very self-conscious person.

I suppose what happened is that I spent my whole life wanting to be cool but eventually came to recognise the mechanism of how coolness works. So it's not really that I don't want to be cool anymore - it's more like I've come to realise that coolness doesn't exist the way I once assumed.

I actually really love people.

After being in a 'professional rock ensemble,' there's a great joy in making music with friends, without any release plan.

When I was a kid, when the Walkman came out, I was sold. I listened to music 24 hours a day.

My personality is based on an anonymity and failure. Failure and anonymity, those are my strengths - superiority from below.

The Fall was super powerful to me because of their covers. They were intimidating. I bought 'This Nation's Saving Grace' when it came out in 1985, and there was something about it that made me nervous. It terrified me.

I actually want to write a treatise in defence of pretension. I think the word 'pretension' has become like the word 'ironic' - just this catch-all term to distance people from interesting experiences and cultural engagement and possible embarrassment.

Titles are relatively arbitrary to me; they take on meanings that aren't really my meanings. 'Sound Of Silver' was just, like, I made the studio silver, and I wanted the record to sound 'more silver.'

DJing is really, really pleasant. It's like having people over and making hors d'oeuvres.

Producing is always really hard, and you can never tell who's going to be easy to get along with and who's going to be difficult.

Warhol had resonance because it was high art and low art. And you could argue about it endlessly.

'Somebody's Calling Me' was written in my sleep, and the original was just the piano and the beat and the singing.

When given the opportunity to fail myself or fail someone else, I choose to fail myself.

Making 'Sound of Silver' was very emotional at times, where I just hated making that record.

I've been to Manchester enough to know it's a real place. It's not Factory Records and the Smiths bicycling around. I get it. It's a modern city.

I've watched too many artists in my life forget how good the things they used to do were.

I can be staggeringly evangelical. That's just my personality.

I'm kind of stunned by hip-hop and R&B's embrace of what is essentially early-to-mid-Nineties Euro pop.

I miss producing. I hate it when I do it, but I love it.

When Andy Kaufman performed, he was not just trying to be funny. He was playing with the notion of what it means to try to be funny, of what it means to be an audience expecting somebody to be funny. He was doing a dance and playing a game.

To me, the band is like one of my homes, in fact. It's not like, 'I've got to get out of this band. I've got to go home.' This band is home in a lot of ways. It's my closest friends; it's a place where I really feel comfortable and happy.

You can't be afraid to embarrass yourself sometimes.

Subway Symphony is a little idea I had to change the sound of the subway turnstiles into different pieces of music, depending on what station you're entering.

There's a difference between a cheap lie and a beautiful lie.

I'm really focused and obsessed with writing things that are specific. I don't like big rock lyrics - I find them infuriating.

A lot of the time, you compromise., which is fine - it's part of not being totally insane.

I know it seems like LCD Soundsystem sold millions and millions of records, but we didn't. I'm not a wealthy person.

Anything that's resolvable is boring, musically. And if it's too chaotic, you don't feel tension; it's chaos.