Quotes from David Byrne

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

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

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,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?

Yeah, I like to keep myself interested - I'll kind of throw myself into some area that I don't completely know or understand, that I'm not adept at, so I'm forced to swim in order to stay afloat. There's a good feeling that comes from that.

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.

Yeah, it's pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

Performing is a thing in itself, a distinct skill, different from making recordings. And for those who can do it, it's a way to make a living.

I love getting out of my comfort zone.

There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop.

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.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

I cycled when I was at high school, then reconnected with bikes in New York in the late '70s. It was a good way of getting around the clubs and galleries of the Lower East Side and Soho.

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

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.

Most of our lives aren't that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

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.

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

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone - a memory.

The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror - not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.

Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes.

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.

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