Quotes by David Byrne

“On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one's own town.”

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

“But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more. If done poorly, they can destroy ...”

“I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial a...”

“Powerpoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it's a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good.”

“I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.”

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

“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,' b...”

“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 b...”

“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 worl...”

“It's a bit like sympathetic magic in a way: the usual Western presumption that 'primitive' rituals mimic what they desire to achieve--that phallic objects might be believed to increase male potency...”

“Complete freedom is as much curse as boon; freedom within strict and well-defined confines is, to me, ideal.”

“In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they're singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it ...”

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

“You might say that the universe plays the blues.”

“Presuming that there is such a thing as "progress" when it comes to music, and that music is "better" now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It...”

“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 ...”

“Recordings aren't time sensitive. You can hear the music you want whether it's morning, noon, or the middle of the night. You can "get into" clubs virtually, "sit" in concert halls you can't afford...”

“The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that ...”

“The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.”