James Murphy

“I wouldn't say I'm a friend of David Byrne, but I guess I'm an acquaintance. I'm obviously an admirer, and we've met, but we don't call and chat about 'Breaking Bad' or anything.”

“For most of my life, making music has cost me money. So I learned to live very, very cheaply.”

“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...”

“It's strangely energizing to have people who don't make music themselves take potshots at you from the Internet.”

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

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

“I have a very toxic combination of being completely determined, inflexible, controlling and being totally shy, guilty at hurting anyone's feelings, hypersensitive to other people's needs - a...”

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

“I got a phone message from Janet Jackson saying, 'Hi, I love 'Losing My Edge', can you do me something funky and dirty like that?' I can't really do off-the-peg stuff, so I never called back...”

“Songs can click together really quickly, and other times, they're really laborious and heavy-lifting.”

“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 e...”

“If I opened a record store, it wouldn't be all punk rock and esoterica.”

“Punk rock, to me, was always outsiderness. When I first saw large-group-scene punk rock, I was repelled by it, because there were way too many people who agreed with each other.”

“I had friends who were jocks or whatever... Then, around 12 or 13, kids get cliquish and cruel, and that disgusted me. It seemed a reprehensible use of one's arbitrary social status. So I go...”

“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.”

“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...”

“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 never did albums fully at DFA; I always would go someplace else so I wasn't making a record in my office, basically.”

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