Murphy: "Artists are what you think they are because they are characters."

Murphy: "I consider my music to be non-fashion-orientated...not restricted by the time and the fashion and the musical environment of that particular year that it was released. It has a much longer, lasting effect. And so all my albums can be listened to in any given sequence and not necessarily sound as if they belong to a certain period."

Murphy: "There’s a certain saturnine quality about me as a person which makes me quite focused as a performer, quite tense."

Murphy: "The unfulfilling job is not the failure; not pursuing your dreams is the real failure. Developing a vision requires conquering your fears and finding motivation from within."

Murphy: "Since there is no wrong or right, you just reap what you sow."

Murphy: "When I was a child, I felt very dislocated from what was expected and what I was seeing around me as being the conventional way to live. It’s coming to the point now where that’s an unacceptable way to be. But back then, I didn’t realize that was the case until I got a point of reference. That’s when you get older, into your early teens. You start to see what might be called a more sensitive nature, which might be termed artistic, the source of wanting to create something. And you disappear into that."

Murphy: "I always wanted to be able to speak and express myself in a way that wasn’t full of fear and inhibition."

Murphy: "The goths are beautiful, a vast depth of subcultural, aesthetic and poetic ideas, and we would identify with that as we did back in 1979. But not the post modern distortion...the costume without the brain."

Murphy: "Yes. I guess it's the foolish romantic in me, but you see, I don’t think that sex is my Muse."

Murphy: "Turkey is like a First World country spiritually and a Third World country economically. It's a very rich country in that sense. It allows me to be as abstract and poetic as I am."

Murphy: "Rewriting is like scrubbing the basement floor with a toothbrush."

[Criticism directed towards an interviewer that hadn't listened to his recent album]

Murphy: "It’s frustrating that I know you’re just doing this for a job. There’s no soul there. I now feel that there’s no point in talking about it. I mean, why talk about something that the person hasn’t really listened to?”