Quotes from David Byrne

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

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.

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

I've rarely kept my distance from kind of - I don't know if we can call it politics, but kind of, civic engagement and that kind of thing, except I tended to think, 'Well, do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.'

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

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.

I don't listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don't have a car.

I've noticed a lot of younger artists have less fear of doing different sorts of things, whether it's various types of music, or gallery artists moving between video and sculpture and drawing.

We don't make music - it makes us.

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.

Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community.

There's more good music being made now than ever before.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

So there's no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn't necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn't necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

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?

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.

It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

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

I found music to be the therapy of choice.

And you may find yourself in another part of the world And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?" Letting the days go by...

Performers try harder.

Musicians sort of knew this already—that the emotional center is not the technical center, that funky grooves are not square, and what sounds like a simple beat can either be sensuous or simply a metronomic timekeeper, depending on the player.

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 corresponded to emotional states, and they'd be avaliable to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.