Quotes By Alex Kapranos

There's a difference between expectations and aspirations.

A lot of food criticism has a similar flavor to it, and I'm probably going to write about it in a different way.

You really only understand whether a song's good or not when you properly play it out in public for the first time.

I think a lot of bands are creatively knackered when they come off tour.

It's very rare that a song falls from your mind complete.

There are loads of bands I'd love to produce.

If success had come along when I was 17 it would either have killed me or sent me completely mad.

Traditionally, lots of vagrants and unemployable characters wind up working in kitchens.

I want to make music that will make the blood surge in your veins, music that will get people up and dance.

People's musical tastes are fickle, and music can be a fashion.

The internet is like a gossipy girls' locker room after school, isn't it?

It doesn't matter how adventurous you want to be, you've still got to contain your identity.

I'm not a food critic, and I'm not really an authority to write anything on food.

Just because you can leap off a drum kit doing a scissors kick while hitting a chord, people expect you to be an extrovert socially. But I'm not always comfortable with the idea of small talk at a party.

No matter what you do, if you're trying to create something new, your environment has a massive impact on you.

The best songwriting comes from being as creative as you can and editing it down to the good bits, essentially.

I didn't grasp the basic principle of being a promoter, which was: Put on music but also generate an income. I was on the dole most of the time.

Cinema, which is influenced by every single part of life, is direct and reaches you immediately. And writing - the best writing is complex ideas communicated concisely. And music - if it's a good tune, make sure people can bloody hear it.

A lot of bands have the enthusiasm kicked out of them by playing really dreary pub venues that just churn bands through.

If I was a fan of someone as a teenager, then it's OK for me to feel completely in awe when I meet them.

There's a character that I play onstage, and I can't let him loose in the supermarket when I'm buying my beans on toast.

Ambition is sneered at by some bands. It seems like a pretty good thing to me.

Men behave very oddly in the company of attractive women.

It's easy to be lazy when there's food lying around backstage or there's a fast-food joint a couple blocks away. But if you walk a little further, ask around a bit, of course there are exciting things to discover.

Why play a chord when you can play one note?

Of course, there's a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that's part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism.

I think in the world of indie music there's this sort of false modesty.

Glasgow's not a media center. When you're there, when you're hanging about, you feel quite detached from musical movements or fashions or anything like that. You do feel quite alone, in a good way.

You can only begin to be great when you embrace a sense of your own ridiculousness.

Although they might not admit it, I think girls are very aware of the impact that they're having. But they never feel it themselves, and it's impossible to explain. It's like trying to tell a blind person what yellow is.