Quotes from Ezra Furman

I always felt like I had a punk album waiting to be made.

We take a lot of inspiration from punk rock and early rock 'n' roll from the '50s and early '60s.

I feel like my consignment and fear from people pushed me to become a performer.

I'm not so adept at social media. It's not my forte.

My main theme as a songwriter seems to be a feeling of homelessness, of being in motion. The feeling of being somehow unmoored, a radical internal freedom that is very painful and also joyful.

I believe an authentic Judaism would legislate total equality for queer people.

I was thinking very carefully about going into education, becoming a teacher, maybe becoming a rabbi.

Part of what you hear when somebody says something awful to you is like, 'They're right, I look ridiculous, why am I dressed this way, I should go home and change.' For me that voice is always in my head, right around the corner.

It's a good feeling to not tell people what's going on.

I had so many secrets and so much social repression throughout my life. I guess I'm just a shy person and feel like my true self is unacceptable to most people.

What really is wild about rock 'n' roll? Nothing. It's so banal and so part of corporate culture. It threatens to lose all its life.

You know, a lot of people have an instinct to downplay the fact that they are performing and be, like, 'There is no theatre here. This is just me playing the songs.' At some point I just realised how much better it could be if you weren't shy about being a performer.

I guess I just do being a man different than some.

I think of myself as a tomgirl. A boy who's girly in every presentational aspect. And I play guitar and write good songs.

I don't really believe in trying to erase every Woody Allen movie from history. For one thing, that's kind of unfair to all the people who worked on those movies or albums or whatever it is. What did they do wrong to have their work erased from culture?

You have to be an anti-racist to not be racist. Because it's just a cultural tide that will pull you into it if you're not swimming against it.

I always maintain that artists do not have any responsibility to do anything except cause no harm and do whatever we want to do as artists.

I honestly feel like I've been mostly toiling in obscurity until a little bit after 'Day Of the Dog' came out.

As children my grandparents were refugees. Eventually they got to the U.S. - in 1950 or something. They grew up as refugees. Their earliest memories are of living in a home with their family. It's in my blood, I guess, to have a fear about encouraging fascism.

To have knowledge of Judaism and to be a religious Jew or an interested Jew, is to have a doorway into a worldview that is entirely alien to the rest of the world's worldview.

I don't really worship the album 'Transformer.' It's not the best thing that Lou Reed has done.

I was a suburban kid who fancied myself somehow intellectual. I was into punk rock but I couldn't get into the subcultural signifiers of dyed hair, safety pins and torn denim. Being a punk seemed like a new set of rules that I wasn't interested in having to follow.

A repressed person overcoming their repression always makes good music.

I get stage fright really bad sometimes, so touring has been hard on me in a lot of ways. But despite that, I love performing.