David Byrne Quotes

My favorite time of day is to get up and eat leftovers from dinner, especially spicy food.

Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex Pistols

Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.

Cycling can be lonely, but in a good way.

I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house... love is kind of big. I have written a love song, though. In this film, I sing it to a lamp.

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

It seemed [there are] musical nodes on the planet where cultures meet and mix, sometimes as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like slavery or something else, in places like New Orleans and Havana and Brazil. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that.

I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself.

I don't care how impossible it seems.

People will remember you better if you always wear the same outfit.

When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.

I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.

All you needed was a couple of instruments and a few chords and you could be on an indie label.

I knew I wanted to have a doll of myself on the cover. I thought, I wanna see myself as a Ken doll.

We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that - the art of it - is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do.

It's not music you would use to get a girl into bed. If anything, you're going to frighten her off.

As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.

Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself - clay to be available for future use.

Everything's intentional. It's just filling in the dots.

When you fall in love, you feel like a missing piece of a puzzle that's been found.

Schools are for training people how to listen to other people.

The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means - allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece - when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there's an instant "Aha!".

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

Technology has altered the way music sounds, how it’s composed and how we experience it. It has also flooded the world with music. The world is awash with (mostly) recorded sounds. We used to have to pay for music or make it ourselves; playing, hearing and experiencing it was exceptional, a rare and special experience. Now hearing it is ubiquitous, and silence is the rarity that we pay for and savor.

We are like the birds. We adapt. We sing.

With music, you often don't have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don't know why.

...if photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless.

I've changed my music from time to time so I'm hoping that I can completely change my life from time to time, too. Like live in another land, in another place, and just get completely soaked up in another way of being. Could be in this country or another country, somewhere were you can be reborn a number of times not just creatively, but personally as well. I guess I want to go through life as more than one person.

To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.

There's an old joke that you know you're in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it's the other way around you're in hell.

With pop music, the format dictates the form to a big degree. Just think of the pop single. It has endured as a form even in the download age because bands conform to a strict format, and work, often very productively, within the parameters.

Body odor is the window to the soul.

Often I don't know what the song means until it's finished. Sometimes months later. I don't think that's bad. It implies that I don't know what I'm doing but-I think if you're able to follow your instincts, then that's knowing what you're doing.

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.

Crime is a job. Sex is a job. Growing up is a job. School is a job. Going to parties is a job. Religion is a job. Being creative is a job

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.

Something about music urges us to engage with its larger context, beyond the piece of plastic it came on-it seems to be part of our genetic makeup that we can be so deeply moved by this art form. Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing.

Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?

That's the one for my tombstone... Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?

I love writing. I don't claim to be great at it. Occasionally I get a good sentence off. But I love the activity.

By the time Talking Heads were starting, my feeling was to throw out everything and start from scratch onstage; strip it down to as close to zero as you can get and then you can make it yours.

The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror - not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.

People in Latin America... love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.