Bradford Cox Quotes

I'm tired of watching attractive people trying to be ugly, struggling for authenticity. Why not be yourself?

Everything I do is 100% automation, which means I'm just doing it live.

What could be more experimental than me writing a straight up love song?

When I go on a nostalgia trip it's not aesthetic. For me it's about trying to recapture the smell or the feeling of something that I've experienced in the past personally.

I don't know if I have any real aspirations to be an actor. It was just something I was asked to do in sort of a friend way. And I thought, Why not?

The Internet nowadays is all sensationalism, and it's just terrifying when you're actually experiencing it as a person.

I always write the first and last song of an album first, and then the middle just kind of happens.

When young groups put out albums, they're always forced to go through this cycle of touring and talking and flaunting and posturing and peacocking. Nobody makes me do that anymore.

I don't think you should make music to make music, just to show that you can. That's the opposite of vitality.

I'm obsessed with five different things a day. It's like lightbulbs in a Christmas light chain.

Everybody just needs to realize that when you write something you're just in one mood. I was told I needed to write it and it was overdue; I don't even remember what day it was.

We all come back to our little worlds.

The sober guy is always going to have this air of arrogance or self-righteousness, but it's not my intention. I just knew that if I drank, I'd have a drinking problem.

You don't need to drink if you have emotional problems.

A lot of bands wanna do something new all the time and never repeat themselves, but I'm not so interested in that. If I feel like I can do it better the second time, I'll give it another shot.

People say 'I don't want to die alone!' But you know what, honestly? I don't want to die with a bunch of people looking at me.

I see a lot of people doing an "'80s thing" who weren't even born until the '90s.

It's made me cynical at a young age to see how overlooked certain groups I've admired are.

That's what culture is based on, the passing down of a certain narrative by imitation.

I want to build an audience that's willing to follow us in whichever direction we might choose.

It was like I was asking for attention, but I didn't really want attention.

If you're not Jay-Z, a record leaking isn't going to affect you.

I've always said I write albums; I don't write random songs and then sort them out.

I've always been interested in writing from other people's perspectives and other gender perspectives.

I've got this thing where I always kind of diss the older stuff and favor the newer stuff. I mean, it's not just my thing; every artist or musician is like that, I guess.

Audiences tend to dig the earlier stuff by any given musician, and the artists themselves always tend to prefer the thing that they're doing now.

When I started having a couple of beers and loosening up, I realized how many years I had wasted going back to my hotel room alone when I could have gone and just had a beer or two.

The same people that always think I'm pretentious will think I'm pretentious, and the people who relate to me will continue to relate to me.

You're always as a musician trying to shock yourself or create music that's maybe even too weird for your own taste.

I feel very strongly about the subject matter in The Dallas Buyer's Club - about AIDS and people fighting illnesses, and fighting for survival against bad conditions.

For me, experimenting involves traditionalism.

I like my solitude, and I'm a strong-willed person; I'm a very hard-to-be-around person sometimes, I guess.

As a homosexual, my job is simply to sodomize mediocrity.

I'm more into Neil Young and radical honesty.

I think the younger kids need to realize there's this whole forgotten 90s that people don't really talk about.

I've been used for writing rhythm guitar chords for a long time because it's so easy to play and chords just sound good on it.

Sometimes, I do have something to say, so I'll sit there and I'll write a song to someone - and then I just throw it away because it makes me cringe.

I need punk rock. It's the medicine for me, but it's bitter and sickening. If you don't need it - if you're happy and healthy - run toward that.

I've been going through some personal things that have stirred up a lot of old wounds.

I refuse to put myself into a situation in which I have to face some kind of "I'm losing it" kind of thing. I'm not "losing it"; it's changed. What it is is changing.

I don't have the capacity to write stuff consciously. When I do, it's really awful.

Unfortunately it's hard for me to be a fanboy for anything these days just because I see so much music.

I'm a really friendly guy, I guess, and I really like meeting people.

I don't like the sound of my own voice. And, for people I don't know, their impression of me is what they read on the internet, and they're so far off a lot of the time.

I don't leave my room, and all I am surrounded by are guitars and equipment, y'know? It's not always the best place to be.

I don't have anything to prove.

All music is devotional, whether it's devotion to products, face washes, creams, plastic. Everybody is devoted to something.

We didn't have MTV, and I was desperate for something. You know, you're young, you want something off the beaten path. And Twin Peaks was like, surrealism on network TV.

Usually I'm not really conscious of what's going on. I don't have a lot of memories onstage. At all.

I'm real critical of myself. I think a lot of what I've done is boring indie rock. I didn't intend it to be that way, but somehow milk gets added to everything.