Quotes from Alex Kapranos

If success had come along when I was 17 it would either have killed me or sent me completely mad.

You can only begin to be great when you embrace a sense of your own ridiculousness.

Arty. To me the word's got as much venom associated with it as 'wacky'.

I really want it to have an impact on the world. I want to be in a town on the other side of the world, and somebody walks up and says, 'That music you made in Glasgow, I listened to it every day, and it moved me.'

I'd rather eat a cow-pat on a bun than a bloody McDonalds.

Ambition is sneered at by some bands. It seems like a pretty good thing to me.

A lot of food criticism has a similar flavor to it, and I'm probably going to write about it in a different way.

I'm not a food critic, and I'm not really an authority to write anything on food.

Glasgow's not a media center. When you're there, when you're hanging about, you feel quite detached from musical movements or fashions or anything like that. You do feel quite alone, in a good way.

It's easy to be lazy when there's food lying around backstage or there's a fast-food joint a couple blocks away. But if you walk a little further, ask around a bit, of course there are exciting things to discover.

I'm not a food critic, and I'm not really an authority to write anything on food.

Just because you can leap off a drum kit doing a scissors kick while hitting a chord, people expect you to be an extrovert socially. But I'm not always comfortable with the idea of small talk at a party.

There's a difference between expectations and aspirations.

People's musical tastes are fickle, and music can be a fashion.

If I was a fan of someone as a teenager, then it's OK for me to feel completely in awe when I meet them.

Traditionally, lots of vagrants and unemployable characters wind up working in kitchens.

Music should be universal. My life perspective, my lifestyle - I'm not going to impose that on the people that listen to my music. That's kind of a perverse form of snobbery I like to reject.

Being in a band didn't buy me my beans on toast!

There's a character that I play onstage, and I can't let him loose in the supermarket when I'm buying my beans on toast.

You really only understand whether a song's good or not when you properly play it out in public for the first time.

I didn't grasp the basic principle of being a promoter, which was: Put on music but also generate an income. I was on the dole most of the time.

It doesn't matter how adventurous you want to be, you've still got to contain your identity.

I think a lot of bands are creatively knackered when they come off tour.

Boredom or being sick of what you've done before is a big part of being in a band.