David Byrne
I subscribe to the myth that an artist's creativity comes from torment. Once that's fixed, what do you draw on?
I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.
I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.
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.
I'm guarded; I don't talk much.
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.
Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex Pistols.
That's the thing about pictures: they seduce you.
The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove.
When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.
You may say to yourself: "Well, how did I get here?"Collection: May
The more you know, the more you know you don't know and the more you know that you don't know.Collection: Knowledge
People will remember you better if you always wear the same outfit.Collection: Remember You
I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.Collection: Song
I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself.Collection: Advertisements
When everything is worth money, then money is worth nothing.Collection: Money
I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.Collection: Color
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.Collection: Song
Cycling can be lonely, but in a good way.Collection: Lonely
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.Collection: Art
The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.Collection: Unique
I don't care how impossible it seems.Collection: Care
We are like the birds. We adapt. We sing.Collection: Motivation
Science's job is to map our ignorance.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Simple
Schools are for training people how to listen to other people.Collection: School
I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?Collection: Sea
Body odor is the window to the soul.Collection: Window To The Soul
I found music to be the therapy of choice.Collection: Choices
Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Years
We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that - the art of it - is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do.Collection: Breakup
The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means - allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece - when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there's an instant "Aha!".Collection: Mean
I love writing. I don't claim to be great at it. Occasionally I get a good sentence off. But I love the activity.Collection: Writing
It's not music you would use to get a girl into bed. If anything, you're going to frighten her off.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Ephemeral
In the future, women will have breasts all over. In the future, it will be a relief to find a place without culture. In the future, plates of food will have names and titles. In the future, we will all drive standing up. In the future, love will be taught on television and by listening to pop songs.Collection: Song
Technology has altered the way music sounds, how it’s composed and how we experience it. It has also flooded the world with music. The world is awash with (mostly) recorded sounds. We used to have to pay for music or make it ourselves; playing, hearing and experiencing it was exceptional, a rare and special experience. Now hearing it is ubiquitous, and silence is the rarity that we pay for and savor.Collection: Technology
Creative work is more accurately a machine that digs down and finds stuff, emotional stuff that will someday be raw material that can be used to produce more stuff, stuff like itself - clay to be available for future use.Collection: Emotional
...if photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Zero
Metal buildings are the dream that Modern Architects had at the beginning of this century. It has finally come true, but they themselves don't realize it. That's because it doesn't take an Architect to build a metal building. You just order them out of a catalog - comes with a bunch of guys who put it together in a couple of days, maybe a week. And there you go - you're all set to go into business - just slap a sign out front.Collection: Dream
The world isn't logical, it's a song.Collection: Song
Maybe it's naïve, but I would love to believe that once you grow to love some aspect of a culture-its music, for instance -you can never again think of the people of that culture as less than yourself. I would like to believe that if I am deeply moved by a song originating from some place other than my own homeland, then I have in some way shared an experience with the people of that culture. I have been pleasantly contaminated. I can identify in some small way with it and its people.Collection: Music
Interviewer: If I gave you fifty dollars, right now, what would you do with it?David Byrne: I would get something to eat.Collection: Dollars
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.Collection: Travel
My favorite term for a new kind of performance is "security theater." In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It's a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge,off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater.Collection: Agency
Book learning, or intelligence of one sort, doesn't guarantee you intelligence of another sort.You can behave just as stupidly with a good college education.Collection: Book
Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex PistolsCollection: Sex