Quotes from Bernard Sumner

I've realized that I owe people a look behind the scenes of my own story, because I don't think anyone can have a true understanding of the music without an insight into where it came from.

We're all private people, but as a musician, I think that once you get to the point where there's more of your life behind you than in front of you, you owe it to your public to explain yourself.

II'm quite a successful musician, but I'm not sure if it's my vocation.

If you choose to take a path in life, don't blame other people for the path you've chosen to take.

If it wasn't for John Peel, there would be no Joy Division and no New Order. He was one of the few people to give bands that played alternative music a chance to get heard, and he continued to be a champion of cutting-edge music throughout his life.

If you go out and just play the old stuff and never write new stuff, you're not really a complete musician, you're a performer.

I think if you take 'Get Ready,' 'Waiting For The Siren's Call,' 'Lost Sirens' - those three New Order albums were mostly guitar-based. There were a couple of dance tunes in there, but they were mainly guitar-oriented. They came about through jamming, a lot of them.

There's parts of touring I like. I like the actual performance part, but the bit when you're in the airport waiting at the carousel for your bags to come around, I don't like that a bit.

I knew from working with New Order that I enjoyed working with Phil Cunningham.

It's weird: people used to want your autograph; now what they want to do is to take your photograph with an iPhone. And sometimes they'll pop their arm around you to hold their iPhone; they're shaking when they take it.

I saw the Sex Pistols, and they were terrible.

It's disrespectful to the older generation to have long hair. They fought in two world wars; they didn't fight for us to grow our hair and look like girls.

We played at a festival in Mexico City, at the same time as another famous artist, and I reckon we had 55,000 people watching New Order; the other had 7,000. I think from that I've discovered the secret of success in the music industry: don't do any promotion.

When you grow up without a brother or sister, you tend to see things just through your own eyes. You have friends and everything, but you spend most of your time watching TV or sat in a room making decisions about your life on your own.

In New Order, I played about 95% of the synths. It's not much fun for the other guys in the band when I'm playing my synth parts.

I think when you're in your 20s, going from adolescence to about 24, I think your life is a series of emotional storms that you have to weather. Life is more emotional at that time, and you're less equipped to deal with what life throws at you. I always think that if you can get past 24, than life really starts at that point.

I entered music at a poppy level.

I was no good at anything else at school. But I was good at one thing, which was creativity.

I think that if you're on the same team, you should be pushing in the same direction.

You have to find balance. Whenever I start feeling stressed or not feeling myself, it's about balance, and it means I need to find it again.

Los Angeles produced the Beach Boys. Dusseldorf produced Kraftwerk. New York produced Chic. Manchester produced Joy Division.

It's impossible to capture every single facet of someone's personality in a film.

By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.

The words that I'm most happy with are the ones that come from my subconscious rather than my conscious. They just feel right. I think that's the same with music, really. If you're doing an album, there's ten or eleven sets of lyrics, so you get to the point of inspiration ten or eleven times - it's difficult.