Quotes from Roisin Murphy

My father ruined me for men. Not many can live up to him.

I've not got any terrible stories of what I had to do to scrabble my way to the top, obviously, because I didn't scrabble my way to the top. I just scrabbled my way to the middle!

I thought I would be a visual artist when I was growing up, so I'm always up for a bit of experimentation.

My da used to sing 'Take Her Up to Monto' to me when we were walking down the street - he still does, actually - because it's got a walking tempo, and I still sing it to myself when I'm walking along.

I collect words and phrases and cut things out of newspapers and keep scrapbooks and write down ideas in my phone or 10,000 notebooks all around my house. It's not very organised, but I keep collecting, so I did have a lot of material to help me to write songs.

I didn't spend my childhood trying to be a performer; it was a big surprise to me that this was what I was doing. But it has always felt quite natural to me. I wasn't taught to do what I do; I found out bit by bit.

I've only ever had surprises. My whole career's a surprise!

Lyricism was placed into my head in Ireland.

I'm quite drawn to women artists who use themselves in their work. There is a very feminine point of view, the use of female archetypes. I love artists who play with those kind of things genuinely.

I was surrounded by music in my family, surrounded by people who sang songs - every single person I knew as a child growing up had one, two, three songs they knew from start to finish.

I was given this beautiful coffee table book of Soviet architecture for my birthday. It has a lot of holiday camps, swimming pools, theatres, and buildings that were built for leisure activities. Incredible architecture in the most obscure places. It's a little bit sad, because a lot of it has been left to fall apart.

I feel more like an artist than a pop star, and I accidentally fell into what I do. Everything was just an experiment.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

I'm really into architecture, I'm a member of the Brutalist Appreciation Society; I'm a member of the Postmodern Society. I write letters to save buildings.

With Moloko, we tried to be the opposite of what was out there at the time. I like to be different. In the mid-Nineties, music was quite dour and serious, and everything was dressed down. So we went the other way. Our first record was about not wanting to do four-to-the-floor dance music.

I've always been attracted to weirdos.

I think my whole career has been marked - or marred - by what people presume about me. But even that's fed back into the creativity. I'm saying that I'm about contradiction, that you can't put me into a box.

Designers become translators for me. That's why I've gone to people like Gareth Pugh and Viktor and Rolf - they are speaking a nuanced language. Fashion says a lot for me.

I won't let anything destroy me.

It's a natural disposition for me to become muse-like in a relationship.

I've got crap teeth, crap hair. I never have facials. I still have hairs in the middle of my eyebrows.

One of my favourite books of all time is 'The Borstal Boy.'

I'm brave and fearless when I'm performing, but in real life, I'm actually quite prudish.

There's a great deal of tension between so many kind of distinctive and restrictive female archetypes and images in the world. When you play with the archetypes, you get free.