• "I have never felt the pressure from others.The only pressure we feel is from ourselves. We've only wanted to impress each other." --Brett on media critics.

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• "I was never into being controversial.It's as if people need diversions...it's something I never tried to do. If I say something about sex or drugs, all of a sudden I'm this drug crazed, sex crazed God. If I do a six-hour interview, and I say the word 'drugs' once, there will be a huge headline on the story that reads "DRUGS!" with my photo underneath. But, I'm not going to talk about doing crosswords all day. I just say what I think." --on controversy

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• "Yes. The way in which we're writing now is much more open. Instead of following a formula, which is pretty much what we were doing before, now there's a lot of freedom in what we do. Whatever it takes to get a good song, we'll do it. I'll wander down to Richard's and just hum him a tune and he'll work out a guitar riff and he'll take it to the band, or whatever. It's just really random ways of working."--on the changes in the writing process between Bernard and Richard.

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• "If we wanted to be controversial we'd have called the album I fucked dogs.It's fucking easy to be controversial and difficult to be good." --on the Suede's album cover

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• I think they're all right. Yeah. I don't know their music very well but I think they're quite exciting, which is good for a English band. I think they sound pretty natural. --on Oasis.

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• "Anyone who is shocked by two women kissing in 1995 is a fucking half-wit," --on Suede album cover.

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• "He just didn't really enjoy being in the band anymore. There was just no point having anyone in the band who doesn't think it's the greatest thing on earth, you know what I mean?" --on Bernard's departure.

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• "A bit less clinical, a bit icier, and maybe a bit less heroic - a bit less romantic, and that's always been our forte, that's always been this weapon we've got in our back pockets. The next album will be an Orwellian romantic album, a romance for numbers rather than people. --on the Suede's next album.

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• "It's fantastic. It was the naked man in a dog collar snarling at the camera. That was a fucking brilliant picture but we couldn't get the rights to that. So perhaps we should have gone with that and then I could be discussing controversy with you. I don't think it's a big deal. There are people who are professionally outraged nowadays . That's their job. But no one's actually outraged. They just think they ought to be." --on DMS original cover.

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• "I think he wanted to do everything himself. He's very musical and he just wanted to sit and play guitar and write songs. And if you want to be in a big band, you actually have to work at it. You have to be singer and musician and businessman and politician and interviewee and all these things at the same time." --on Bernard.

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• "It stank. I think it's shit." --on the name London Suede.

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• "Very, very rarely. Not normally. When I wrote this album, I wasn't even drinking. I just locked myself in a white room for 14 hours a day. Pepped myself up with ginseng. Very occasionally I feel inspired by drugs, but not very often. And when we play live, it's funny, when we play live, none of us even have a beer before we go on. We played before 70,000 last year at a festival and we were the only people straight there." --on drugs.

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• "What's the drug of choice? [laughs] I'll take anything, man. I don't really like slow drugs. I don't like drugs that slow you down. I don't like downers. I don't like anything that makes you fucking buzz off to a dream world. I like things that heighten..." --on drugs.

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• "Very occasionally something goes through my head like, y'know, start thinking about toast or something like that. But that's pretty occasional. My cat sometimes wanders through my head." ---on losing concentration on stages.

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• "I think the musicianship in the band has improved since they've come into the band.Neither of them has this thing about doing 'their thing.' Like Neil will come up with something, then Richard will, and they both egg each other on and have this competition with each other which is good, y'know? It's healthy to have competition within the band."--on the new members of Suede.

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• "Losing Justine that early gave us a kick up the arse. It made us go away and regroup and rethink what suede were about. That was quite an important thing to do, really. It's almost like shedding a skin and coming out as something else. You can draw a parallel between what's happened with Bernard now, losing him and going away and regrouping to make this latest album." --on Suede's succes after Justine left.

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• "Ha, ha! That would be an interesting thing to see. I'd quite like to see that." --when asked if Suede is without him

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• "It's difficult to talk about, again. We were very unified early on and then things just started going wrong. Bernard had always been slightly separate from the band. I don't know what happened. It just happened, like it does." --on Bernard's separation from the band.

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• "He's a really nice bloke as well. I get on really well with him, which is nice. I spend a lot of time with him socially and he's one of the nicest people to be with you can imagine. He's a really funny bloke and he does incredibly funny impressions of people." --on Richard.

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• "I think so. It's part of the new regime of freedom in the band. I'll work with anyone. If Simon comes up to me and says, "What about this?", I'll go with Simon." --on the collaboration with Mat.

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• "I think there's always a place for Suede because we occupy a space that no one else occupies." --on Brit rival bands

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• "My only regret is that we didn't take it further. Bernard left the band when there was a lot more in us." --on Bernard's departure.

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• "There was a lot of insanity going on at that time. The rest of the band were enjoying their position at that time, having a good laugh. we thought we deserved to enjoy ourselves in quite an extreme way, and let off a bit of steam. And Bernard didn't want to be part of that"--on that final tour with Bernard.

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• "My only regret is that we didn't take it further - he left the band when there was a hell of a lot more in us. We were untouchable, heading for the fucking moon. There were more creative juices left to flow."--on Bernard departure

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• "I'd always known Bernard was going to leave…Totally known it. It was a matter of when. There was a sense of self-destruction, of tightrope-walking with Suede when Bernard was with us." --on Bern.

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• "I was very unhappy. I'd lost the most integral part of the band; and I knew I had two years of touring and recording before I could prove that we weren't all over. It was on e of those crappy phases in life where you wanna crawl into bed for 6 months, but I was happened to be in the middle of the tour." --on his puffy look and twitchy appearances in interviews.

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• "There's no meaning with my life but to be in Suede, none at all. I would stop excisting; there is absolutely nothing else I care about. I'm definitely not interested in getting up in the morning if it hasn't got to do with music. That's the only thing I know I can do really well, so I put my soul and all my time in it. There is nothing else..."--on his way of life

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