Quotes from David Byrne

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.

There's a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech," said Purves. "That's the reason we like music. Music is far more complex than [the ratios of] Pythagoras. The reason doesn't have to do with mathematics, it has to do with biology.

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

You might say that the universe plays the blues.

Patience is a virtue but I don't have the time.

I wanted to find a reason not to be cynical—to have some faith even when nothing around me seemed to justify it.

There are two conversations going on at the same time: the story and a conversation about how the story is being told.

There's always room for Jell-O

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 and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility.

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.

Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects.

The classical players who think all popular music is simple tend not to hear the nuances involved, so naturally they can't play very well in that style. Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects. When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that's when the details take on larger meanings.

It was a uniform that signified that one was a kind of downtown aesthete; not necessarily nihilistic, but a monk in the bohemian order.

Some of you people just about missed it

If they liked a tune, they wanted to hear it again—now! The vibe was more like CBGB than your typical contemporary opera house.

I ride on the shoulder of a road that is lined with chain stores, none of them specific to this area. Everyone who works in them is therefore an employee hired by some anonymous distant corporation. They probably are only allowed to make small decisions and they have almost no stake or investment in the place where they work.

What begins as a random walk often ends up taking you somewhere, somewhere that you later realise was exactly where you wanted to go.

Music eats its young and gives birth to a new hybrid creature.

how much of the audience's fun was sacrificed in the effort to redefine the social parameters of the concert hall—it sounds almost masochistic of the upper crust, curtailing their own liveliness, but I guess they had their priorities. Although the quietest

Johannes Kepler published his book Harmonices Mundi in 1619. In it he proposed that it was the Creator who "decorated" the whole world, using mathematical and musical harmonic proportions. The spiritual and the physical are united.

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 is a myth. Creativity doesn't "improve.

Sometimes it seems as if writing a group of songs is like getting groceries, or doing the laundry—banal things I do more or less on a day-to-day basis. We deal with the issues involved in our mundane activities as they come up

People probably heard a greater quantity of music, and a greater variety, on these devices than they would ever hear in person in their lifetimes.

Music as social glue, as a self-empowering change agent, is maybe more profound than how perfectly a specific song is composed or how immaculately tight a band is.