Julian Casablancas's Quotes

L.A. is a vortex. The weather there tricks you into thinking you're on vacation, even when you're working fourteen hours a day.

L.A.'s kind of, like, seven really cool towns. It's so laid-back. If you go in the right spot, you can walk around, and you don't need a car.

Making an album can be like being pregnant: you want to pop that thing out and show everybody!

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

New York is in my soul.

No matter who I'm talking to, I always talk like I'm doing an interview.

No one leaves an old friend unless they are ashamed.

People are always arguing: New York or L.A.? They're both great places, you know.

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

That it's a lot harder to make a keyboard sound not-cheesy than a guitar.

The Strokes can play anything. They could play 'Thriller,' and it would just sound like 'Thriller' as played by the Strokes.

The thing for me is I never had this burning desire to do a solo record my whole life.

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.

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

Working on music is the funnest thing for me, and I love it, and I could do it all day, all night.

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

I have to say, I'm good with gifts. If I find something perfect for a certain person, I'll just get it and put it away in a kind of nook under my bed - a little gift hutch, if you prefer.

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 very often have night terrors. Just think of the worst possible situation, and it's a regular thing for me. I've died in my sleep twenty-three different ways.

I would prefer it if people thought that I didn't work hard, that I just played the guitar for three minutes a week and was like, 'Check out this song - what do you think?' That would be ideal. I would prefer telling people that I'm just truly talented.

I'm always writing something. I've got so much stuff, I don't know what to do with it. Some of it will be Strokes, some of it will be I don't know what - stuff for pop singers. TV themes. I've got a jar stuffed with songs, all these ideas that are just me humming into a recording device.

If the choice is between doing something supercool and having no one hear it and doing something equally cool and tricking people into putting it on the radio, I don't think the second option is some big sellout.

If you're in a bar and a certain song comes on and the vibe is just different, it evokes the kinds of things that you want to feel, and if music can do that it's a very special thing.

In most cultures, you can have a kid at 18 and it's not a big thing. It's not like, 'Oh, you've got to get a different haircut and move to the suburbs and act, like, 35.'

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.