Top 258 Quotes & Sayings by David Byrne
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Scottish musician David Byrne.
Last updated on November 3, 2024.
Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren't as strong as some of the others, so you look better.
Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.
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.
That's the one for my tombstone... Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?
There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop.
My favorite time of day is to get up and eat leftovers from dinner, especially spicy food.
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.
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.
I love getting out of my comfort zone.
I think I had a mild case of Asperger's as a younger guy, but that typically just wears off after a while.
Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?
I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.
Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.
I couldn't take pictures of green rolling hills.
Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.
I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.
All you needed was a couple of instruments and a few chords and you could be on an indie label.
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.
I knew I wanted to have a doll of myself on the cover. I thought, I wanna see myself as a Ken doll.
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.
I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.
I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I'm someone else.
The arts don't exist in isolation.
Everything's intentional. It's just filling in the dots.
Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.
With music, you often don't have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don't know why.
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.
Life tends to be an accumulation of a lot of mundane decisions, which often gets ignored.
We don't make music - it makes us.
I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.
I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.
People use irony as a defense mechanism.
Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce.
Frank Lloyd Wright... his things were beautiful but not very functional.
It's not always been a happy marriage. I guess I wanted a quick fix.
I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.
To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.
Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context.
I've been in beautiful landscapes where one is tempted to whip out a camera and take a picture. I've learned to resist that.
I'd like to be known for more than being the guy in the big suit.
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.
I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it.
To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.
The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror - not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.
I have trouble imagining what I could do that's beyond the practicality of what I can do.
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.
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.
When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.
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.
I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.
That's the thing about pictures: they seduce you.
I subscribe to the myth that an artist's creativity comes from torment. Once that's fixed, what do you draw on?
Most of our lives aren't that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.
I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.
It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.
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.
You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.
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.
Cycling can be lonely, but in a good way. It gives you a moment to breathe and think, and get away from what you're working on.
I don't listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don't have a car.
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