Ben Folds Quotations

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The other reason Rufus and I are great together is that we're both really lazy. The rehearsing, the sound checks -- he's actually worse than I am, and that's something. To get us to do anything other than sit in our dressing rooms is a challenge. Who knows what will happen?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Everything I write is personal, really. Even when I'm sarcastic, it's quite personal. And on this record, from the production to the singing to the performances, I got it really honest. To the modern ear, it seems soft. When you hear it against other things, it seems vulnerable. Lyrically and musically, though, this is more subtle. And, yes, it's asking a lot of someone who's used to being hit over the head with bright neon to listen to this.

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.

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

I'm definitely an anomaly, but I'm making things. They're selling, say, martinis, and I'm kind of making vintage Riesling. People aren't going to sit there very often, not your average public, and your average music-business monster is not going to take the time to notice the overtones and the undertones inside the flavor. They'd rather just have the martini.

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

I feel like a quote out of context,

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

Off the coast and I'm headed nowhere

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

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.

Im really good at writing almost hits.

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

I start songs all the time. If I weren't so lazy, I would finish them. It's like when I have a deadline I have to. I always feel very lucky that I am forced to make records at certain times. If I was forced to make 2 records a year, I would write twice as many songs. I can't make myself finish something unless I am forced

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.

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

With a song, it only takes a couple of minutes to go back to the beginning and try it again to see if it works. The novel freaks me out because, what if you get into the eighth chapter and think, 'Let's go to the top and see if this works again? It's going to take me three weeks.' I'm in awe of that.

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.

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.

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.

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

People learn at the rate they are going to learn.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I don't leave my neighborhood. I don't go anywhere. There are four blocks I live in and there are two coffee shops, one at each end of the block... so I don't do much driving... Some people would say they never see me because I don't go anywhere. I stay in the blue state of Nashville, in my bubble.

Life barrels on like a runaway train where the passengers change, they don't change anything, you get off someone else can get on.

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.

I was pretty much a dork growing up. Going up in front of a crowd and being an idiot was a relief when I was a kid. But talking to two or three people at once and being myself was impossible. And being myself while singing a song was more than impossible; I would've rather died. I get really nervous and tend to want to be an idiot.

Was I gung-ho about changing society when I was 18? I don't know about that. When you're 18, you're really into yourself and what's happening to your body. But I definitely had some ideas. This malaise is not confined to America either. I spotted that same attitude in kids in Eastern Europe before the fall of communism.

People rush around in the summer to try and find like-minded musicians to put together. Packages are all the rage. I prefer keeping it smaller, having a tour that's manageable -- both for me and the audience -- and Rufus and I go together in certain ways. We're both out of step with any kind of music scene. We don't really fit in anywhere. I think we feel similarly disenfranchised -- in a good way. Also, I can listen to Rufus every night. That's important.

It's not safe, but yeah, I can flip a piano over. You take it on this side where there's not really as much weight.

I had to play a George Harrison song at a benefit a couple nights ago, and it was really hard for me. Obviously it wasn't my world.

The main thing is that we performed the songs, then went to the speakers - if we liked it, we kept it; if we didn't, then we did it again. That seems like the most obvious way to record, but it really isn't the way we make records in this day and age. This is just very old-fashioned.