Quotes from Julian Casablancas

My parents separated when I was eight. I grew up with my mom alone.

I mean, I guess you could say I'm a bit of a perfectionist.

Songwriting is hard - it's so easy to fall into the same traps. It's not like I wake up and songs flow out of me.

It's not like I wake up and songs flow out of me.

Birth is a beautiful thing.

One of the big songwriting things for me has always been: always think what you do sucks. Because the second you stop believing that, you suck. And that's a fact.

Boarding school didn't feel like my world, I felt like an alien; people there had a lot of money.

I want to be one of those people, be they writers, poets, musicians, who leaves clues for the next generation. The really good people leave clues that help feed the human race. That's my aspiration.

I see myself out of my own eyes, which means I have no idea what's going on the other way around. I just think I try to be a good person, and I fail.

I think all of Manhattan has pretty much become a bar-slash-nightclub-slash-restaurant. There were always pockets of that. But now every corner of Manhattan is that.

I think I used to do everything and then people had a problem with that within the band, so we're doing more of a communal thing.

Whenever I go to shows, I end up looking at what shoes the guy onstage is wearing and the jacket he's got on. And when you know everything's gonna be under scrutiny, it makes you feel more comfortable if you have cool stuff.

I'm not a pop song lyric writer. I can't just focus on one simple meaning or even a double entendre.

Sometimes I've sat outside, not to tan, but as a result of that I ended up tanning slightly.

Religion is never the problem; it's the people who use it to gain power.

There are so many little places I want to play, sometimes weird places I think would be fun to play... a bar that's half full.

Greed is the inventor of injustice as well as the current enforcer.

If it doesn't start with you, it dies with you.

Art is the image of life, it's purpose simply to enhance it.

Compared to people in Africa, I think we've all had privileged upbringings.

Can our mind evolve to be something other than an extension of our animal needs?

You know some of the people in The Strokes, yeah, their parents had success - but we didn't live like yuppies.

People often put me in a V-neck tennis club sweater, driving a Bentley, but my life wasn't like that.

Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?