Paul Banks Quotes

Everyone is broken-hearted except for the drastically unimaginative

You can't just imitate and keep coming up with ideas. You have to be tapping into something that's pure and unconscious in yourself or you'll have no career.

I got the chess bug when I was finishing high school, we were doing chess tournaments at my house. I never got to a very high level.

If you're an artist, you do what you do, and in a way, you don't even control the core essence of what you do. You try to mold it and develop a style, but the core elements of what you do are just part of who you are.

I would have issues with directions songs were taking, but I never heard one of Carlos' [Dangler] basslines and said, "I don't like that, do something else." The same goes for the beat and the guitars. I think that's why we were able to make four albums together.

That's for non-musicians to say: "I only listen to this or that type of music." I think musicians love all music, or at least that's my case.

Basically, every band that makes it has some dude with some sense of business. I don't know if our band would've been so successful were it not for Daniel's [Kessler] insight into how things really work. Daniel was the one who was diligently saying, "We should make a demo, send it out, play shows but not too many shows, get on shows with touring bands that are coming to New York."

It's not like changing one word with my lyrics is going to make them more intelligible or relatable. I was always very misunderstood and taken as very pretentious and serious all the time. I would think, "Do you not see there's a lot of tongue-in-cheek and humor here?".

It's an unmeetable level of writing. But even if it's something I feel like I can't ever attain, it doesn't crush my spirit. I figured out early on that you gotta find your own strengths and hone them rather than trying to emulate something that impresses you.

I never wanted to start a band to sound like Nirvana.

I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.

Sometimes you learn about the personality of your favorite artist, and you like their art a little less, because it doesn't jibe with what you had envisioned.

In an artistic and spiritual sense I'm really not that concerned about what happens after the album is done.