Bernard Sumner

“There's challenges in life that present themselves unexpectedly, and if you rise to them, then those challenges will toughen you up.”

“I always felt like there were always egos involved when I was trying to get music finished in New Order. Sometimes it would feel like I was running through water.”

“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.”

“If I work on music, it'll be for 10 hours a day, so sometimes I'll feel stressed, and I'll go for a two-hour walk. That sorts me out.”

“I never met Morrissey.”

“I'm not interested in the past or in talking about myself.”

“If someone throws you in a pool and you can't swim, you're going to struggle.”

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

“The story of New Order is all about learning from our mistakes.”

“I'd had to cope with a lot of death and illness in my family from a young age, and that maybe gave me a bleak outlook on the world.”

“I believe that every business and company takes two years to establish.”

“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.”

“If something I do now sounds like something I did in the past, it's because I played it. I can't help sounding like myself. That's going to happen. The things that I play on guitar that resonate with me are probably the same things that resonated with me when I started playing in Joy Division.”

“Playing live is great, but it's not a creative thing, really. It's a reproductive thing.”

“If you're driving around or at home with the stereo blasting pure dance track, it gets boring within about 15 minutes. It doesn't work at home like it does in a nightclub. You've got no atmosphere.”

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

“Where I grew up was a place called Salford, which was the industrial heartland of Manchester. And where I lived in Salford, I could walk to the center of Manchester within about 20 minutes. So I lived really close to the center.”

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

“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.”

“With guitar, bass and drums, you've got limited horizons.”