Ben Folds

“I'm really good at writing 'almost hits'.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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