Bernard Sumner Quotes
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I'm not interested in the past or in talking about myself.
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One of the things I like about music is it's an abstract art, totally abstract, where you can convey an emotion, which I find amazing.
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I'm sure every time I bring something out that isn't New Order, people say it sounds like New Order.
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Playing live is great, but it's not a creative thing, really. It's a reproductive thing.
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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.
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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.
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The drummer is the backbone of the band and is the real underrated one.
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You don't see yourself in the same way other people see you.
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If you start off writing an album with a band, the reality is that you're constantly in each other's company, so it's really important that you get on with each other.
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There were certain things I couldn't do with New Order without upsetting the rest of the band, so I started to write some solo stuff.
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Landscape affects you.
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I used to be a party monster, very into Acid House, which I saw as my weekend reward for working hard all week.
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I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.
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If you hear a New Order track that's mostly electronic, it's generally come about through one person sitting at a computer and programming it.
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It's weird: people used to want your autograph; now what they want to do is to take your photograph with an iPhone. And sometimes they'll pop their arm around you to hold their iPhone; they're shaking when they take it.
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If you're a lead singer, then you can't afford to be sensitive. On stage, everyone looks at the lead singer, even if you don't want them to - in America, they have those massive follow spots on you all the time; it does your head in. So, if you are a lead singer and you don't toughen up, you're in the wrong job, and you have to get out.
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There's challenges in life that present themselves unexpectedly, and if you rise to them, then those challenges will toughen you up.
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I felt that by the late '90s, I'd gone as far as I could with the keyboard.
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Thatcher was wrong. People don't exist - well, they don't flourish - as individuals. Life's about swapping ideas and communicating with other people.
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As you get older, you kind of take a more sober view of life.
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It can be an educational thing to play your songs to people because you see where you've gone right and where you've gone wrong.
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You spend more time with your fellow band members than your girlfriend or wife, and you end up at each other's throats. It happens to all bands.
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There's parts of touring I like. I like the actual performance part, but the bit when you're in the airport waiting at the carousel for your bags to come around, I don't like that a bit.
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I knew from working with New Order that I enjoyed working with Phil Cunningham.