Quotes from James Murphy

I was into punk rock my whole life. I never listened to the Eagles. I never listened to things that were getting Grammys. So getting a Grammy nomination wasn't bad, it just wasn't meaningful.

My high-techness is pretty low-tech. I'm not wildly computer savvy. I'm a record person.

If being in a band was my job, then I would quit. This is not a good job. A good job is in financial management.

I don't want to be subsumed into popular culture and played on the radio next to some garbage music.

In my experience, people looking for progress aren't actually looking to move things forward. They're looking to be perceived in a certain way: as a forward thinker. It's about vanity rather than any altruistic motives for the art.

One of my favorite photographers is Ruvan Wijesooriya, who takes most of the LCD photos. His work is incredibly colloquial and raw.

I was a singing guitar player as a kid, and I found it really embarrassing, so I stopped singing and became a drummer.

Those early years in New Jersey were amazing. We lived in a really small town with tons of kids my age. There were fields and woods and a creek - it was a pretty ideal place to be a little kid.

We didn't set out to be cool. We set out to be an extremely tight band. We wanted to defy expectations. The more negative your mindset on coming to one of our gigs, the better for us, frankly.

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'm a DJ, and I live in Williamsburg, and I run an independent record company.

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

If there was a direct influence on a song, I never hid it.

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.'

I think I'm designed to regret everything.

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

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.

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.

Restaurants remind me of bands: there's lots of camaraderie, people work very closely together, very hard, and it's a bad job to pick if you want to make lots of money. Whether music or food, the reward always has to be because you love it.

When I do a remix, I try to think about what I don't have in my bag and create something to fill that gap.

I was always just blown away by David Bowie and how mannered the guy was willing to be. It was so far from what I imagined someone with my confidence to be capable of.

I don't prepare very well. I'm always sort of wrapped up in what I'm supposed to be doing in the moment, and then I suddenly appear someplace, and I'm really not prepared.

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 - and it's just paralysing.

I don't write off silly pop people at all, because you never know where they're coming from.