Top 88 David Byrne Quotes

Suburban houses and tin sheds are often the objects of ridicule.

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You’re not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.

Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context.

I’m very much into making lists and breaking things apart into categories.

It’s a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn’t support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, ‘Well, yeah,’ but you start to think, ‘Why not, though?’ What makes one more valuable than another?

I resent the implication that I’m less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works.

The voting booth joint is a great leveler; the whole neighborhood – rich, poor, old, young, decrepit and spunky – they all turn out in one day.

The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove.

I cycled when I was at high school, then reconnected with bikes in New York in the late ’70s. It was a good way of getting around the clubs and galleries of the Lower East Side and Soho.

The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?

Physical contact is a human necessity.

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

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.

I think I had a mild case of Asperger’s as a younger guy, but that typically just wears off after a while. For some people, anyway.

Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don’t buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down.

I think I had a mild case of Asperger’s as a younger guy, but that typically just wears off after a while.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that’s pretty much all you can ask.

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.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they’re going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It’s just a given law.

Domination and monopoly is the name of the game in the web marketplace.

If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It’s really only to be heard when everyone’s out enjoying it.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

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

I have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

Frank Lloyd Wright… his things were beautiful but not very functional.

There’s a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you’re self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn’t so easy in a car, and you can’t cover as much ground walking.

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

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

Cycling is a joy and faster than many other modes of transport, depending on the time of day. It clears the head.

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

I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I’m someone else.

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

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.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don’t censor yourself, you end up with what you’re most concerned about, but you haven’t filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

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 meet young people who know me and are familiar with my stuff. They know the package. They might have cherry-picked five or six key tunes. That’s how it seems to work. I sometimes wonder if they realise they are not getting the whole context.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that’s not something I could do.

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.

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

I’ve made money, and I’ve been ripped off. I’ve had creative freedom, and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will.

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

I don’t like begging money from producers.

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

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

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

I’m proud of ‘Stop Making Sense,’ but it’s a little bit of an albatross; I can’t compete with it, but I can’t ignore it either.

The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

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.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

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.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

I’ve rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.

In retrospect, I can see I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!

I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

From what I’ve heard, Paris did a little bit more prep work as far as making bike lanes and all of that stuff. They really did it properly, which New York is getting to little by little.

So there’s no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn’t necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn’t necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

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

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

Work aside, we come to New York for the possibility of interaction and inspiration.

People hear about stuff from their friends or a magazine or a newspaper.

I am an immigrant with a Green Card and, therefore, I am not eligible to vote in a federal election.

Some artists and indie musicians see Spotify fairly positively – as a way of getting noticed, of getting your music out there where folks can hear it risk-free.

I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.

I’ve never had writer’s block.

I’m afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

I couldn’t take pictures of green rolling hills.

I’m not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

I’ve noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it’s various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.