Top 100 Quotes About David Byrne
#1. Interviewer: If I gave you fifty dollars, right now, what would you do with it?David Byrne: I would get something to eat.
David Byrne
#2. I wouldn't want to compare myself to David Byrne whom I consider a genius, but what I think what we have in common is that he's also a guy who is very interested in the world and who has a lot of passions beyond singing and playing guitar.
Anthony Bourdain
#3. That's the one for my tombstone ... Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?
David Byrne
#4. 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.
David Byrne
#5. There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop.
David Byrne
#6. I knew I wanted to have a doll of myself on the cover. I thought, I wanna see myself as a Ken doll.
David Byrne
#7. 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.
David Byrne
#8. I can't deny that label-support gave me a leg up - though not every successful artist needs it.
David Byrne
#9. I don't think people are going to switch over to bikes because it's good for them or because it's politically correct. They're going to do it because it gets them from A to B faster.
David Byrne
#10. My favorite time of day is to get up and eat leftovers from dinner, especially spicy food.
David Byrne
#11. Dissanayake writes that art that engages the mind and hands, that is not just passive connoisseurship, can act as an antidote, for our contentious and alienated relationship to our own societies.
David Byrne
#12. 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.
David Byrne
#13. 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.
David Byrne
#14. My opinion is that somebody certainly has the right to do cartoons that make fun of somebody else's religion. But to reprint them just to provoke a fight and just to provoke it like thumbing your nose at someone else and going, What are you gonna do about it?
David Byrne
#15. Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don't sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.
David Byrne
#16. I've rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.
David Byrne
#17. 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.
David Byrne
#18. You are the masterpiece
of your own life.
You are the Michelangelo
of your own life.
The David you are sculpturing
is you
(Dr. Joe Vitale)
Rhonda Byrne
#19. Yeah, anybody can go in with two turntables and a microphone or a home studio sampler and a little cassette deck or whatever and make records in their bedrooms.
David Byrne
#20. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.
David Byrne
#21. I'm afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn't fit that will become unnecessary.
David Byrne
#22. 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.
David Byrne
#23. no one has ever gone to war over music.
David Byrne
#25. 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.
David Byrne
#26. Where music is heard can determine the sort of music created by the artists who perform there.
David Byrne
#27. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone - a memory.
David Byrne
#28. I think sometimes I get carried away, like I'm speaking to an imaginary audience rather than just trying to figure something out for myself. Ideally, I try to balance that - that I'm asking these questions of myself, how does this work, why does this happen, what's going on here.
David Byrne
#29. Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.
David Byrne
#30. That's the thing about pictures: they seduce you.
David Byrne
#31. Johannes Kepler published his book Harmonices Mundi in 1619. In it he proposed that it was the Creator who "decorated" the whole world, using mathematical and musical harmonic proportions. The spiritual and the physical are united.
David Byrne
#32. It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.
David Byrne
#33. 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.
David Byrne
#34. Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.
David Byrne
#35. The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror - not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.
David Byrne
#36. Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?
David Byrne
#37. This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around.
David Byrne
#38. 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.
David Byrne
#39. To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.
David Byrne
#40. Rich people will travel great distances to look at poor people ...
David Byrne
#41. I ride my bike almost every day here in New York. It's getting safer to do so, but I do have to be fairly alert when riding on the streets as opposed to riding on the Hudson River bike path or similar protected lanes.
David Byrne
#42. Schools are for training people how to listen to other people.
David Byrne
#43. One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy, but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat, and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn't move to New York to make a fortune.
David Byrne
#44. As everything becomes digitized, there's the idea that things that can't be digitized become more valuable.
David Byrne
#45. It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.
David Byrne
#46. 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.
David Byrne
#47. I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.
David Byrne
#48. People look ridiculous when they?re in ecstasy ...
David Byrne
#49. Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they're intended to be used for.
David Byrne
#52. The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part.
David Byrne
#53. I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it.
David Byrne
#54. I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.
David Byrne
#55. I don't like begging money from producers.
David Byrne
#56. We tend to mistake music for the physical object.
David Byrne
#57. London's tempo is 122.86 beats per minute.
David Byrne
#58. I wave to the double-decker buses from my bike, but the passengers never wave back. Why? Am I not an attraction?
David Byrne
#59. 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.
David Byrne
#60. It was a uniform that signified that one was a kind of downtown aesthete; not necessarily nihilistic, but a monk in the bohemian order.
David Byrne
#61. 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.
David Byrne
#62. Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.
David Byrne
#63. I love getting out of my comfort zone.
David Byrne
#65. Physical contact is a human necessity.
David Byrne
#66. Temple and cathedral are attractive because they spatially and acoustically recreate the cave, where early humans first expressed their spiritual yearnings.
David Byrne
#67. Everyone was doing that in their own way, rejecting things and moving on. It's just a part of discovering who you are; it's nothing special.
David Byrne
#68. I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.
David Byrne
#69. 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.
David Byrne
#71. I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.
David Byrne
#72. One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you're allowed to fail.
David Byrne
#73. Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what's going to happen in my life.
David Byrne
#74. There's a pervasive feeling that when somebody sings a song and records a song on a record, that it's their true feeling.
David Byrne
#75. There are a lot of people that don't scour websites regularly or read music reviews. They need whatever, the other kinds of stuff, whether it's an appearance on Lettterman or posters or ads. They need to kind of be hit more in the face and be told that there's something new out there.
David Byrne
#76. 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.
David Byrne
#77. One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history - or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.
David Byrne
#78. Sometimes the European and North American public like some things to be exotic and kept at arm's length. They don't want sometimes to know that foreign artists are doing something that's at least as relevant as what's being done here.
David Byrne
#79. Yeah, I like to keep myself interested - I'll kind of throw myself into some area that I don't completely know or understand, that I'm not adept at, so I'm forced to swim in order to stay afloat. There's a good feeling that comes from that.
David Byrne
#80. I don't believe that crime, danger and poverty make for good art. That's bullshit.
David Byrne
#81. The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.
David Byrne
#82. If they liked a tune, they wanted to hear it again - now! The vibe was more like CBGB than your typical contemporary opera house.
David Byrne
#83. The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.
David Byrne
#84. I always think the everyday is more relevant than anything too grand because we all have to deal with it.
David Byrne
#85. You might say that the universe plays the blues.
David Byrne
#86. 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.
David Byrne
#87. 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.
David Byrne
#88. 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?
David Byrne
#89. We're on a road to nowhere, come on inside. Takin' that ride to nowhere, we'll take that ride. I'm feelin' okay this mornin', and you know, we're on the road to paradise, here we go, here we go.
David Byrne
#91. I don't think I have grand visions that I will never achieve.
David Byrne
#93. Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community.
David Byrne
#94. Music as social glue, as a self-empowering change agent, is maybe more profound than how perfectly a specific song is composed or how immaculately tight a band is.
David Byrne
#95. Architecture theory is very interesting.
David Byrne
#96. 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.
David Byrne
#97. 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.
David Byrne
#98. 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?
David Byrne
#99. Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.
David Byrne
#100. I've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part.
David Byrne
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