A biography for James Murphyhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“I understand that if someone's going to make me his idea of cool, I can't control that.”
“I don't drink beer, and I don't drink at home.”
“I think that not being all that overwhelmed by good reviews is a luxury. I'm like a rich person who says he doesn't care about money.”
“My personality is based on an anonymity and failure. Failure and anonymity, those are my strengths - superiority from below.”
“I got a phone message from Janet Jackson saying, 'Hi, I love 'Losing My Edge', can you do me something funky and dirty like that?' I can't really do off-the-peg stuff, so I never called back.”
“Subway Symphony is a little idea I had to change the sound of the subway turnstiles into different pieces of music, depending on what station you're entering.”
“There are some people who are just plain great at making music. That's not who I am.”
“Ad Rock from the Beastie Boys gave me a present: it's a boombox with a keyboard and a beatbox in it. You can't make that up.”
“I actually want to write a treatise in defence of pretension. I think the word 'pretension' has become like the word 'ironic' - just this catch-all term to distance people from interesting experiences and cultural engagement and possible embarrassment.”
“When Andy Kaufman performed, he was not just trying to be funny. He was playing with the notion of what it means to try to be funny, of what it means to be an audience expecting somebody to be funny. He was doing a dance and playing a game.”
“One of the big things that broke the band up for me, which I've become much clearer on over the years, was that I had no desire to be famous.”
“I'm an underdog by nature, and I like to be fighting. I don't make music for myself. I make music to fight.”
“I'm generally a very optimistic guy.”
“My high-techness is pretty low-tech. I'm not wildly computer savvy. I'm a record person.”
“I'm a DJ, and I live in Williamsburg, and I run an independent record company.”
“I actually really love people.”
“I don't have a TV, and I don't have a radio.”
“I am kind of, by definition, a hipster.”
“I'm a very self-conscious person.”