Julian Casablancas
A band is a good way to break up a friendship.Collection: Friendship
Religion is never the problem; it's the people who use it to gain power.Collection: Religion
Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense.Collection: Wisdom
Desire is individual. Happiness is common.Collection: Happiness
Greed is the inventor of injustice as well as the current enforcer.
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 over-think stuff a lot.
My parents separated when I was eight. I grew up with my mom alone.
I enjoy songwriting. It's slow-motion improvising.
Who you are vs. who you wish you were: Who wins?
For a long time I didn't want to do a solo thing, but there comes a point where everyone else is going outside of The Strokes and The Strokes filtering process.
Birth is a beautiful thing.
Working on music is the funnest thing for me, and I love it, and I could do it all day, all night.
The best solutions are often simple, yet unexpected.
I'm happy to feed the illusion that I'm a lazy recluse.
I think a lot of people study the rules too much and then don't know how to be creative.
With a hundred ways to do a dozen things, why not try it all?
You know some of the people in The Strokes, yeah, their parents had success - but we didn't live like yuppies.
If it doesn't start with you, it dies with you.
I always reference 'Mad Max' when I think about what I want to wear. But it's a fine line between that and 'Edward Scissorhands'.
The Strokes can play anything. They could play 'Thriller,' and it would just sound like 'Thriller' as played by the Strokes.
Can our mind evolve to be something other than an extension of our animal needs?
A tour is the most intense, stimulating way to hear music; it's the best form to receive it. There's genuine excitement from people. I feel like we've stepped up a level.
No one leaves an old friend unless they are ashamed.
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.
But it can be hard to experiment when you're in a band.
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.
That it's a lot harder to make a keyboard sound not-cheesy than a guitar.
It's not like I wake up and songs flow out of me.
I don't really care about clothes, but it's about wearing something that gives you social confidence.
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.
Boarding school didn't feel like my world, I felt like an alien; people there had a lot of money.
Compared to people in Africa, I think we've all had privileged upbringings.
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.
I mean, I guess you could say I'm a bit of a perfectionist.
The thing for me is I never had this burning desire to do a solo record my whole life.
I always want to make Strokes records and play Strokes shows.
The artistic element of Manhattan has kind of moved to Brooklyn. Has it changed it? Yeah. Has it ruined it? I would say no. It is what it is. I say better that than an urban war zone.
Making an album can be like being pregnant: you want to pop that thing out and show everybody!
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.
No matter who I'm talking to, I always talk like I'm doing an interview.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
New York is in my soul.
I'm not a pop song lyric writer. I can't just focus on one simple meaning or even a double entendre.
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.
When the Strokes first started playing gigs, instead of getting into a costume for the shows, we talked about how we should dress every day, in real life, like we're playing onstage. I don't really care about clothes, but it's about wearing something that gives you social confidence. Or maybe helps you pick up chicks.