As human beings, we all mature physically from childhood to adolescence and then into adulthood, but our emotions lag behind.
Bernard Sumner
You can't escape from yourself, can you?
The drummer is the backbone of the band and is the real underrated one.
My mother, Laura Sumner, had cerebral palsy. She was born absolutely fine, but after about three days, she started having convulsions that left her with a condition that would confine her to a wheelchair her entire life.
Landscape affects you.
I think that if you're on the same team, you should be pushing in the same direction.
Los Angeles produced the Beach Boys. Dusseldorf produced Kraftwerk. New York produced Chic. Manchester produced Joy Division.
Where I grew up was a place called Salford, which was the industrial heartland of Manchester. And where I lived in Salford, I could walk to the center of Manchester within about 20 minutes. So I lived really close to the center.
It's disrespectful to the older generation to have long hair. They fought in two world wars; they didn't fight for us to grow our hair and look like girls.
With guitar, bass and drums, you've got limited horizons.
I used to be a party monster, very into Acid House, which I saw as my weekend reward for working hard all week.
Choosing a name for a band is always a difficult thing, and I don't think people should read too much into a name because, after all, it's just a handle. It doesn't mean anything.
If you go out and just play the old stuff and never write new stuff, you're not really a complete musician, you're a performer.
I think every day how incredibly lucky it is that I travel around the world playing to thousands of people.
As you get older, you kind of take a more sober view of life.
I knew from working with New Order that I enjoyed working with Phil Cunningham.
I was interested in Prozac from a personal point of view because I can be a bit moody - things do get on top of me sometimes - so I was quite keen to find out what it would do to my personality.
If something I do now sounds like something I did in the past, it's because I played it. I can't help sounding like myself. That's going to happen. The things that I play on guitar that resonate with me are probably the same things that resonated with me when I started playing in Joy Division.
There's only two choices when life goes wrong. You deal with it, or you check out, and, like 90% of people, I go for the former.
I'm not interested in the past or in talking about myself.
Joy Division finished the 1970s on a high. Our debut album, 'Unknown Pleasures,' was doing well; we'd just finished a hugely enjoyable and successful tour. The band's profile was higher than it had ever been, and it seemed to be growing by the day.
I get writer's block all the time. The only way I can write what I consider to be good lyrics is to put myself through the mill.
Playing live is great, but it's not a creative thing, really. It's a reproductive thing.
If you're a lead singer, then you can't afford to be sensitive. On stage, everyone looks at the lead singer, even if you don't want them to - in America, they have those massive follow spots on you all the time; it does your head in. So, if you are a lead singer and you don't toughen up, you're in the wrong job, and you have to get out.
The words that I'm most happy with are the ones that come from my subconscious rather than my conscious. They just feel right. I think that's the same with music, really. If you're doing an album, there's ten or eleven sets of lyrics, so you get to the point of inspiration ten or eleven times - it's difficult.
New Order has always been a hybrid band. We always mixed guitar, bass, drums with electronic.
You can't put rubbish into a computer and get something good out.
If you have a bereavement in your family, it's a terrible, terrible thing. But, you know, time passes. It's part of the cycle. It doesn't hurt so much.
I think in South America people are very, uh, they have no inhibitions and wear their hearts on their sleeves - what's the word? They're very expressive, demonstrative.
Being a single mother in the late 1950s was a very shocking thing - and dreadful thing - for people.
I saw the Sex Pistols, and they were terrible.
If you choose to take a path in life, don't blame other people for the path you've chosen to take.
I'm terrible with decisions. And I can't make myself do something I don't like. I can't knuckle under.
I entered music at a poppy level.
I'm not interested in how well someone can sing. It's what you're singing that interests me.
If you're driving around or at home with the stereo blasting pure dance track, it gets boring within about 15 minutes. It doesn't work at home like it does in a nightclub. You've got no atmosphere.
If you hear a New Order track that's mostly electronic, it's generally come about through one person sitting at a computer and programming it.
One of the things I like about music is it's an abstract art, totally abstract, where you can convey an emotion, which I find amazing.
I'd had to cope with a lot of death and illness in my family from a young age, and that maybe gave me a bleak outlook on the world.
I like a challenge. I like learning new skills because I didn't learn much at school.
There's challenges in life that present themselves unexpectedly, and if you rise to them, then those challenges will toughen you up.
In Salford, we had fish in our tap water. I remember, one hot summer day, running to the toilet at playtime and dunking our heads in a sink full of water. I remember putting my head in and seeing all these little fish in it.
I'm sure every time I bring something out that isn't New Order, people say it sounds like New Order.
You have to find balance. Whenever I start feeling stressed or not feeling myself, it's about balance, and it means I need to find it again.
The story of New Order is all about learning from our mistakes.
Joy Division sounded like Manchester: cold, sparse and, at times, bleak.
It's impossible to capture every single facet of someone's personality in a film.
I felt that by the late '90s, I'd gone as far as I could with the keyboard.
It's weird: people used to want your autograph; now what they want to do is to take your photograph with an iPhone. And sometimes they'll pop their arm around you to hold their iPhone; they're shaking when they take it.
There's parts of touring I like. I like the actual performance part, but the bit when you're in the airport waiting at the carousel for your bags to come around, I don't like that a bit.
