David Byrne Quotes

“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.”

— David Byrne

“A history of nightlife!
what an interesting concept. A history of a people, told not through their daily travails and successive political upheavals, but via the changes in their nightly celebrations and unwindings. History is, in this telling, accompanied by a bottle of Malbec, some fine Argentine steak, tango music, dancing, and gossip. It unfolds through and alongside illicit activities that take place in the multitude of discos, dance parlors, and clubs. Its direction, the way people live, is determined on half-lit streets, in bars, and in smoky late-night restaurants. This history is inscribed in songs, on menus, via half-remembered conversations, love affairs, drunken fights, and years of drug abuse.”

— David Byrne

“I pick up a copy of Newsweek on the plane and immediately notice how biased, slanted, and opinionated all the U.S. newsmagazine articles are. Not that the Euro and British press aren't biased as well
they certainly are
but living in the United States we are led to believe, and are constantly reminded, that our press is fair and free of bias. After such a short time away, I am shocked at how obviously and blatantly this lie is revealed
there is the 'reporting' that is essentially parroting what the White House press secretary announces; the myriad built-in assumptions that one ceases to register after being somewhere else for a while. The myth of neutrality is an effective blanket for a host of biases.”

— David Byrne

“Years ago
I was an angry young man
I'd pretend
that I was a billboard
standing tall
by the side of the road
I fell in love
with the beautiful highway”

— David Byrne

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

“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

“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

Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.

— David Byrne

“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.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

“I don't like begging money from producers.”

— David Byrne

“I'm very much into making lists and breaking things apart into categories.”

— David Byrne

“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

“I've got nothing to say most of the time.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

“I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn't mean you don't have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be.”

— David Byrne

“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

“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

“Probably the reason it's a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you're getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you're going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there's a kind of bundle.”

— David Byrne

“I always think the everyday is more relevant than anything too grand because we all have to deal with it.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

“Physical contact is a human necessity.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

“I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

You go to a festival, you know you're not going to play all new material at a festival. The audience is not there for that. I've made that mistake, but you find out pretty quickly.

— David Byrne

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!

— David Byrne

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.

— David Byrne

“Well, Marx is having a comeback. I hear him mentioned a lot in terms of the global financial situation and the general sense of injustice out there. A lot of economic experts in America refer to him without actually using the M word, but he's around.”

— David Byrne

“I love getting out of my comfort zone.”

— David Byrne

“We tend to mistake music for the physical object.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

“Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.”

— David Byrne

“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.”

— David Byrne

“Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing. It's whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day.”

— David Byrne

“Performers try harder.”

— David Byrne

There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.

— David Byrne

“In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a desperate attempt to communicate, but now I found that singing was both a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn't take away from the emotions being expressed-even if they were melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad.”

— David Byrne

“With headphones on, you can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety, and the lack of uncontrollable reverb inherent in hearing music in a live room means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact; it doesn't get blurred or turned into sonic mush as it often does in a concert hall.”

— David Byrne

“Maybe the difference between speech and music isn't all that great. We infer a lot from the tone of someone's voice, so imagine that aspect of speech pushed just a little further. The weird cadences of a Valley girl, for instance, might be viewed as a species of singing. The malls of Sherman Oaks are a setting for a kind of massed choir.”

— David Byrne

“The WASP style was often portrayed on TV and in movies as a sort of archetypical American look, and some of my new friends seemed to subscribe to it. I decided I'd try it too. I'd tried other looks previously, like Glam dude and Amish geezer, so why not this one?”

— David Byrne

“Music, I would argue, is a part of what makes us human.”

— David Byrne

My personal feeling is that human beings have this incredible capacity for denial.

— David Byrne

“The most common music that you hear anywhere in the world now basically has its roots in that union that happened in the last century, or in the century before that. That kind of music that's groove or beat oriented just didn't exist in lots of cultures before that.”

— David Byrne

“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

“I'm not all about money, but, like most musicians, I am about survival.”

— David Byrne

“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

“The world isn't logical, it's a song,”

— David Byrne

“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