Top 180 David Byrne Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Real sadness is such an all-encompassing intense thing that it takes you out of your humdrum existence. If you can still function, you want to show it while it’s peaking. So when people tell you to cheer up, it’s not always the best thing.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

53. “Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they’re intended to be used for.”

— David Byrne

54. “People use irony as a defense mechanism.”

— David Byrne

55. “Often I don’t know what the song means until it’s finished. Sometimes months later. I don’t think that’s bad. It implies that I don’t know what I’m doing but-I think if you’re able to follow your instincts, then that’s knowing what you’re doing.”

— David Byrne

56. “I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

58. “I don’t care how impossible it seems.”

— David Byrne

59. “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.”

— David Byrne

60. “I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

62. “It’s not always been a happy marriage. I guess I wanted a quick fix.”

— David Byrne

63. “I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I’m someone else.”

— David Byrne

64. “I couldn’t talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

67. “The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?”

— David Byrne

68. “A bike is the world’s most used form of transportation.”

— David Byrne

69. “Architecture theory is very interesting.”

— David Byrne

70. “I love getting out of my comfort zone.”

— David Byrne

71. “There’s still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don’t. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn’t communicate anything.”

— David Byrne

72. “I’m afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn’t fit that will become unnecessary.”

— David Byrne

73. “For years we have been taught not to like things. Finally somebody said it was OK to like things. This was a great relief. It was getting hard to go around not liking everything.”

— David Byrne

74. “My favorite time of day is to get up and eat leftovers from dinner, especially spicy food.”

— David Byrne

75. “Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce.”

— David Byrne

76. “Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.”

— David Byrne

77. “I’m just an advertisement for a version of myself.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

79. “We live in ugly times.”

— David Byrne

80. “I’ve never had writer’s block.”

— David Byrne

81. “If anything, a lot of electronic music is music that no one listens to at home, hardly. It’s really only to be heard when everyone’s out enjoying it.”

— David Byrne

82. “People are renovating places and opening ambitious new venues. That’s one thing that music does. It gets people out of their houses, and gets them hanging out together.”

— David Byrne

83. “I’ve noticed that when I am selling a lot of records, certain things become easier. I’m not talking about getting a table in a restaurant.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

85. “Yeah, it’s pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.”

— David Byrne

86. “The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.”

— David Byrne

87. “My personal feeling is that human beings have this incredible capacity for denial.”

— David Byrne

88. “Every outfit carries cultural baggage of some kind. It took me a while to get a handle on this aspect of performance.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

90. “There’s a great temptation to clean everything up and make everything more perfect. You have to know when to stop and stop doing it, or you might end up with something that sounds metronomic.”

— David Byrne

91. “Some things, I feel like no, I never could have the depth of experience of their own music and culture – but sometimes if I’m collaborating with somebody, they’re interested in me bringing my own stuff into their thing, and sometimes that works.”

— David Byrne

92. “Suburban houses and tin sheds are often the objects of ridicule.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

94. “Sometimes the European and North American public like some things to be exotic and kept at arm’s length. They don’t want sometimes to know that foreign artists are doing something that’s at least as relevant as what’s being done here.”

— David Byrne

95. “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.”

— David Byrne

96. “All you needed was a couple of instruments and a few chords and you could be on an indie label.”

— David Byrne

97. “Another Elvis will not come along. He got wasted, but it’s alright.”

— David Byrne

98. “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.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

100. “I’ve rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.”

— David Byrne