Ben Folds Quotes

#1. Billy Joel and Joe Jackson were both great, and they both play piano.

Ben Folds

#2. I do think that when you make repeated mistakes, it's usually because you're just not coming to grips with something.

Ben Folds

#3. If you can't draw a crowd, draw dicks on the wall

Ben Folds

#4. I love you more than I have ever found a way to say to you.

Ben Folds

#5. The piano is just a different animal. It's expensive, it's big, it's heavy, and it doesn't fit in the mix easily. Everyone grew up with a piano in their living room, so rocking out on the piano was accessible - it wasn't an upper-class thing. Now pianos have become very much a piece of furniture.

Ben Folds

#6. I'm aware that I'm very fringe, and it's nice that way.

Ben Folds

#7. If I'm in a relationship and my girlfriend is sleeping with other people, I don't need to know who it is; I just want to know how she feels about it.

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#8. There is still some art in pop music. But it can't happen if you're not inspired.

Ben Folds

#9. The music business is a weird business. Sometimes licensing doesn't happen because some business component that you never knew about stops it.

Ben Folds

#10. The nature of honesty is that if someone has information or knows something about you that you don't want heard, then they have power over you.

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#11. If you're afraid they might discover your redneck past, there are a hundred ways to cover your redneck past.

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#12. My parents told me I must get married. I was seen as a failure if I didn't do it.

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#13. Even though I live in America more, I feel like when I go to Adelaide, that's when I get to go home.

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#14. The less I talk in bars, write emails, express myself in an emotionally lewd way outside of my songwriting, the more I have to do it through my music.

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#15. I think alcohol is a good drug for me when I'm writing. I don't think I've ever had a problem with it. I can stop for a few weeks, so I think it's okay. I don't think it's good for my liver, but I do love it. It's a huge part of my life, and it makes me happy.

Ben Folds

#16. Notes don't make music until you learn to insert silence between them.

Ben Folds

#17. And I twisted it wrong just to make it right
Had to leave myself behind

Ben Folds

#18. I used to do this big rant at the end of some gigs with Ben Folds Five. The band broke into this big heavy metal thing and I started as a joke to scream in a heavy metal falsetto. I found myself saying things like: Feel my pain, I am white, feel my pain.

Ben Folds

#19. I'm not really a strange person or anything, so if there's music I like, usually there's other people who like it too.

Ben Folds

#20. Being capable of anything is a bullshit concept, unless it means you also admit that you're capable of cheating, lying and killing.

Ben Folds

#21. It's a tough thing to know that when you're making your album, you're going to end up collaborating with, say, Wal-Mart, on your artwork. That just sucks. And the pressure behind getting the numbers real fast is, to me, dizzying.

Ben Folds

#22. If the melody is telling me this is what the song is about, then I'm sort of forced into confession, autobiography or fantasy. If I don't do that, I've hamstrung the melody.

Ben Folds

#23. What stupid f - king idiot gets married a second time if the first time didn't work out?

Ben Folds

#24. When someone really goes to tell you something about what they're thinking, they're going to wear that experience with them. That's what you have to share.

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#25. The clock never stops, never stops, never waits. We're growing old. It's getting late.

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#26. My idea is to play with the people who you know want to get it right. Then it's fun and easy to record, and you can get down to details, like taking out cymbals so the verse doesn't dwarf the chorus, something like that.

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#27. The press is like any business. It's a group of really intelligent individuals that ends up being one slathering, one-eyed, drooling monster.

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#28. The way I see it, there's only one melody for any song.

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#29. Off the coast and I'm headed nowhere

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#30. My job is to be some sort of music/lyric psychic, to figure out that that's the right song to not fight the lyric.

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#31. I divorce myself from listeners who aren't tolerant of humor. I did notice universally that, especially when it comes to weight, people look in the mirror and get the angle just right, tell themselves it's all right, and then they go out.

Ben Folds

#32. I have manic energy. What can be done about it? I don't know what to say sometimes. I'm professional in public, but I like to stay inside and be a hermit.

Ben Folds

#33. People learn at the rate they are going to learn.

Ben Folds

#34. With the a cappella groups, every voice is like one string on a guitar, one note on the piano, or one cymbal, and you don't have the luxury of falling back on anything.

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#35. You can't really control how people hear stuff. It's hard to remember that. I have to let go of it.

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#36. A lot of 18-year-olds are like old men. They think they've seen everything.

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#37. The nice thing about age is worrying less and less about what people think.

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#38. I've gotten to the point where I realize that I need to tell my truth in music and not walk around blabbing my mind.

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#39. Maybe this is wrong, but I feel like I craft my songs carefully enough that I still find that fifteen years after having written one, it still works for me - I'm not cringing.

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#40. And all I really want to say is you're the reason I want to stay.

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#41. I'm older than I was, and I'm still washed-up, and I haven't changed my music one iota. It's just much easier to do this when people are being nice to you.

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#42. In many ways, I've chosen to be plain, almost too plain, too self-effacing. Like, if I record a vocal and I don't like the way it sounds, I would have them turn it up and take the reverb off it to make it as plain as possible.

Ben Folds

#43. Next door, there's an old man who lived to his nineties and one day passed away in his sleep. And his wife, she stayed for a couple of days and passed away. I'm sorry, I know that's a strange way to tell you that I know we belong.

Ben Folds

#44. I think people use temp music quite a bit, but the people who write the temp music don't ever really learn that their music was inspiring a movie.

Ben Folds

#45. You never know when you put out an album that's unique whether it'll get beat up for it or not.

Ben Folds

#46. It's like being in the position of - in half of the industry's mind, you're kind of a cult-following, independent rocker. And on the other hand, you're a sellout. But neither one of them are right.

Ben Folds

#47. Why would I want to sound like Joni Mitchell? I've got Joni Mitchell records, and they're great, and I couldn't possibly be that good.

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#48. I think a lot of good directors listen to music while they're working. The songs just don't become a part of the film. They're replaced.

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#49. Everyone, when you're a teenager and you're growing up, you do feel like your life is dramatic enough to be on a TV screen, but we know that it's not.

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#50. Because I write very simply, but inside the simplicity, there's a lot of subtlety. That's what I'm proud of.

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#51. You have made me smile again; in fact I may be sore from it- it's been awhile.

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#52. Now that I have found someone, I'm feeling more alone ... than I ever have before.

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#53. Rock and roll is - and should be - a kid's place.

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#54. The reason I stop playing songs is usually because I get sick of them, and then they find themselves back into the set list at some point.

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#55. Everybody knows it hurts to grow up ... and we're still fighting it.

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#56. But I really do have a soft spot for the solo shows. Any musician who writes and sings will tell you that's the center of it, that is it. It's almost like there's something church-like about it and you gotta go back there, if you're a songwriter that sings your material.

Ben Folds

#57. I'm romantically inclined. No human being on Earth is not attracted to other people. There is no fairy tale that they only have eyes for you. You just choose to act on it or not.

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#58. I look to an out gay man or woman as pretty much what I would aspire to. The strength that it takes to do that and the floodgates that open and what they pay for it.

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#59. I feel like a quote out of context,

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#60. I drink a lot, probably too much. My scene while writing lyrics is always a bottle of scotch and stacks of note cards, pencil and pencil sharpener. I throw around note cards and drink.

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#61. White people don't sing together very often, and when they do, it's about the celebrity of the song. The singing at my shows is all about harmony.

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#62. The cruelest lies are often told without a word
The kindest truths are often spoken, never heard

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#63. I feel like a quote out of context, withholding the rest so I can be for you what you want to see.

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#64. I'm really good at writing 'almost hits'.

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#65. I do have that mindset - that most good art comes from some turmoil, from someone trying to come to some equilibrium, or come up and get a breath.

Ben Folds

#66. I could probably live in Bali the rest of my life and completely live in the sticks and have a f - king moped and make a record every couple of years and not step in public and break even like I do anyway. That's really tempting.

Ben Folds

#67. I want people to listen to my lyrics and be okay with themselves. The people who have it the roughest are homosexuals who come out of the closet.

Ben Folds