David Byrne Quotes

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.

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.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they're intended to be used for.

What's been missing from digital music sales has been the possibility of added depth. In a printed package one can only include so many images and so much text - for example - but digitally it's wide open.

I couldn't take pictures of green rolling hills.

Rich people will travel great distances to look at poor people.

We've gone through the urban renewal cycle in the '60s and '70s that really did a lot of damage to the fabric of urban life - neighborhoods bulldozed and highways pushed through, and all that kind of stuff that really destroyed the kind of social underpinning and the kind of mom and pop stores and all the stuff that makes a community viable.

Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce.

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.

Body odor is the window to the soul.

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

For years we have been taught not to like things. Finally somebody said it was OK to like things. This was a great relief. It was getting hard to go around not liking everything.

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics.

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!".

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

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

We don't make music, it makes us

There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything. It has to be mediated with some skill and craft, in order to communicate it to a second, a third, or a fourth person. That doesn't make it any less real. And it doesn't make it any less true. But it does mean that, yeah, it's the combination that makes it work.

I think sometimes - not always - I write songs that are accessible.

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

I'm drawn to the stuff that's maybe a little bit on the fringe. Part of that is just practical sometimes. We can't compete with the major labels for some acts, so you figure, "Okay, what could I introduce to people, or what do I like that is within my means?"

Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community.

I'm concerned that my technical skills have advanced to the point where I can get closer to what I'm aiming for, which is not such a good thing.

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

Physical contact is a human necessity.

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

I found music to be the therapy of choice.

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

A bike is the world's most used form of transportation

Yeah, it's pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

I came to New York to be a fine artist - that was my ambition.

My favorite term for a new kind of performance is "security theater." In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It's a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge,off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater.

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

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.

I've noticed that when I am selling a lot of records, certain things become easier. I'm not talking about getting a table in a restaurant.

I'm just wearing regular street clothes. Pretty much all the time. In the summertime, or when it gets warm out, shorts and sandals or something like that. Stuff that I don't mind getting a little sweaty.

We live in ugly times.

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.

That's the thing about pictures: they seduce you.

Things fall apart, it's scientific.

PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows.

In the future, women will have breasts all over. In the future, it will be a relief to find a place without culture. In the future, plates of food will have names and titles. In the future, we will all drive standing up. In the future, love will be taught on television and by listening to pop songs.

Maybe this is all a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own unique aura. But doesn't any collective belief eventually become a kind of truth? If enough people act as if something is true, isn't it indeed "true," not objectively, but in the sense that it will determine how they will behave? The myth of unique urban character and unique sensibilities in different cities exists because we want it to exist.

The idea of making music from an imaginary culture was to give ourselves a set of restrictions and parameters within which to work. Otherwise, we might have just gone on all kinds of creative detours, some of which might have been interesting. But better we confine ourselves to something.

London's tempo is 122.86 beats per minute.

You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.

I've rarely kept my distance from kind of - I don't know if we can call it politics, but kind of, civic engagement and that kind of thing, except I tended to think, 'Well, do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.'