David Byrne Quotes

My favorite time of day is to get up and eat leftovers from dinner, especially spicy food.

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.

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

Cycling can be lonely, but in a good way.

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.

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

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'm just an advertisement for a version of myself.

I don't care how impossible it seems.

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

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.

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

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

All you needed was a couple of instruments and a few chords and you could be on an indie label.

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

As music becomes less of a thing--a cylinder, a cassette, a disc--and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.

It's not music you would use to get a girl into bed. If anything, you're going to frighten her off.

Everything's intentional. It's just filling in the dots.

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

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

When you fall in love, you feel like a missing piece of a puzzle that's been found.

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

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

With music, you often don't have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don't know why.

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

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

Body odor is the window to the soul.

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.

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

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

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.

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

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

You may say to yourself: "Well, how did I get here?"

By the time Talking Heads were starting, my feeling was to throw out everything and start from scratch onstage; strip it down to as close to zero as you can get and then you can make it yours.

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

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

I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.

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

I found music to be the therapy of choice.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I couldn't take pictures of green rolling hills.

I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.