Quotes from David Byrne

I believe it was the Beatles and other singer-songwriters of the sixties who realized that recording your own songs was far more lucrative than doing record after record covering other people's songs, as had often been the norm in pop music. This incentivized songwriting

As someone who believes that much of the source of his work and creativity is to be gleaned from those bubbles, it's a reliable place to find that connection. In the same way that perplexing problems sometimes get resolved in one's sleep, when the conscious mind is distracted the unconscious works things out.

Sometimes it's a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

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

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.

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

I don't care how impossible it seems.

Things fall apart, it's scientific.

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.

I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself.

The better a singer's voice, the harder it is to believe what they're saying.

You may say to yourself: "Well, how did I get here?

The more you know, the more you know you don't know and the more you know that you don't know.

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.

It can often seem that those in power don't want us to enjoy making things for ourselves - they'd prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation.

Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.

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

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.

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.

Stop making sense

Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing. It's whom you were with, how old you were, and what was happening that day.

When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that's when the details take on larger meanings.

Maybe this is all a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own unique aura. But doesn't any collective belief eventually become a kind of truth? If enough people act as if something is true, isn't it indeed "true," not objectively, but in the sense that it will determine how they will behave? The myth of unique urban character and unique sensibilities in different cities exists because we want it to exist.

Music isn't fragile.