Alex Turner quotes:

I like The Four Freshmen, anything with good harmonies, some Beach Boys. I like the girl groups as well, like The Dixie Cups and all that.

I think New York is a good place to write in general because it's a grid. It's organized. You know where you are on the map. That centers you, and your imagination is perhaps freer to roam.

It's a very unnatural environment to be in, up on a stage. So you put up defenses to hide. Like looking at the ground with your hair in your eyes, or being tightly wound and quite aggressive and uncooperative, as I used to do.

Television? It's a gateway to writer's block, isn't it?

I'm like the Ben Affleck of crowd surfing.

There's something about a Gucci loafer kicking on a fuzz pedal.

Every time you write a song, you're looking for some sort of perfection, and you never quite reach it. You're always looking for that extra missing piece.

There's that 15 quid we put on One Direction to win down the drain.

I'm in a difficult position in the sense that, preposterous as this might sound, I don't like being the centre of attention. I get up on stage every night and play songs, but I almost feel the songs are the centre of attention. I don't like opening my birthday presents in front of people, either.

I can be a woodsman if need be. I grew up very close to some forest, and I spent a lot of my formative years up and down trees, fooling around in the woods. I'm no stranger to that sort of landscape.

Rock n' roll seems like it's faded away sometimes, but it will never die.

If anyone asks me about songwriting, I guess I'd say that you just gotta do it.

Be cruel to me , cause I'm a fool for you.

I think I'm alright as a lyricist, you know? But then what will happen every couple of months or so is that I'll hear a song I've never heard before and feel I've gone right back to square one.

You spend your time thinking about that and you get lost in reflection.

There have always been jokes all over our songs; I originally started writing lyrics to make my friends crack a smile, which is difficult.

What came first the chicken or the dickhead?

Maybe I'm too busy being yours to fall for somebody new.

Songwriters always reminded me of that kid at school who would go around with his guitar, like, "Yeah, songwritin' man," looking wistful. That wasn't me - those kinds of people put me off.

Songwriters always reminded me of that kid at school who would go around with his guitar, like, 'Yeah, songwritin' man,' looking wistful. That wasn't me - those kinds of people put me off. In the early days, I'd write a bunch of lyrics and almost look at them as a sort of joke, to make the rest of the boys laugh.

A lot of peopletell me I'm a bit dreamy, but I like the idea of that. Of being somewhere else.

I get nervous about gigs sometimes, but not with records - I always get excited.

There is always that one band that comes along when you are 14 or 15 years old that manages to hit you in just the right way and changes your whole perception of things

It was 2002, we all got guitars for Christmas and started playing in my garage that summer, rehearsed there and in a warehouse for a bit for about a year. We did our first gig in June 2003 and we played a few gigs in and around Sheffield for a bit then started doing gigs outside of Sheffield about this time last year, recording demos while all this was going on.

That rock and roll, eh? That rock and roll, it just won't go away. It might hibernate from time to time, sink back into the swap. I think the cyclical nature of the universe in which it exists demands that acquiesce to some of its rules. But it's always waiting there, just around the corner, ready to make its way back through the sludge and smash through the glass ceiling, looking better than ever. Yeah, that rock and roll, it seems like it's faded away sometimes, but it will never die. And there's nothing you can do about it

I just wanted to do something that would freak people out. That's the best thing to do.

You can't worry what people think.

I still miss the days when a haircut was just a haircut. It was only your mates you had to face. Now there's a whole industry centred around people analysing your 'look'. I just cannot understand how anyone could get so worked up by... hair.

Love's not only blind but deaf.

Sometimes writing songs is like waiting for deliveries.

Rock'n'roll will never go away completely because it's so fundamentally attractive.

I took the batteries out my mysticism / â?¨And put them in my thinking cap