Paul Banks Quotes

“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.”

— Paul Banks

“Everyone is broken-hearted except for the drastically unimaginative”

— Paul Banks

“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.”

— Paul Banks

“If you're playing a one-minute game, I could squeeze in five to six games before anybody walked by my cubicle. So I got really good at blitz, one-minute chess games. But that's kind of like the cheap chess version.”

— Paul Banks

Jeffrey Lewis sings as though absurdity were truth, and truth absurdity. And I think I agree with him.

— Paul Banks

“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.”

— Paul Banks

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

— Paul Banks

“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?".”

— Paul Banks

When I say I had a cosmic confidence that we were capable of writing good music, I'm speaking about that time when we met Sam [Fogarino]. Greg [ex-drummer] is actually a really great drummer and a great guy. I never want to sound like I am belittling his contributions in the early days, but when Sam joined, there was an immediacy of, like, "Here we go."

— Paul Banks

“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.”

— Paul Banks

“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.”

— Paul Banks

If time is my vessel, then learning to love might be my way back to sea

— Paul Banks

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."

— Paul Banks

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

— Paul Banks

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.

— Paul Banks

“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.”

— Paul Banks

“My influences are vast and varied. I was into classic rock at the same time that I was into hip-hop. It was just that hip-hop was the first music that I got really really into. Rock was right on its tail.”

— Paul Banks

“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.”

— Paul Banks

“I don't really get a lot of clarity in my everyday life and my interactions with people. Most things that happen to me aren't very straightforward. They're either vastly confusing, or I realize that I'm inventing whatever meaning I'm deriving from whatever happens and it's filtering through my own indulgent perspective.”

— Paul Banks

“I perceive everything to be constantly subjective and strange. My version of truth in what I express, it feels like that opaque quality that you're talking about. It's just me being legitimate.”

— Paul Banks

The idea of starting a band because of Nirvana and thereby trying to sound like Nirvana is totally not the case.

— Paul Banks