Top 180 David Byrne Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

105. “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.”

— David Byrne

106. “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.”

— David Byrne

107. “I’m afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.”

— David Byrne

108. “I don’t like begging money from producers.”

— David Byrne

109. “I don’t think people are going to switch over to bikes because it’s good for them or because it’s politically correct. They’re going to do it because it gets them from A to B faster.”

— David Byrne

110. “People will do odd things if you give them money...”

— David Byrne

111. “With pop music, the format dictates the form to a big degree. Just think of the pop single. It has endured as a form even in the download age because bands conform to a strict format, and work, often very productively, within the parameters.”

— David Byrne

112. “I’m no Lance Armstrong, but I do use a bike to get from place to place in Manhattan, a little bit of Brooklyn.”

— David Byrne

113. “There’s a pervasive feeling that when somebody sings a song and records a song on a record, that it’s their true feeling.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

115. “You might say that the universe plays the blues.”

— David Byrne

116. “One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you’re allowed to fail.”

— David Byrne

117. “There’s more good music being made now than ever before.”

— David Byrne

118. “London’s tempo is 122.86 beats per minute.”

— David Byrne

119. “My take is that the kind of complexity which says we can always generate complexity from simple interactions following for example rules.”

— David Byrne

120. “A lot of that worked itself out in the recording.”

— David Byrne

121. “I’m very much into making lists and breaking things apart into categories.”

— David Byrne

122. “It’s not music you would use to get a girl into bed. If anything, you’re going to frighten her off.”

— David Byrne

123. “Is giving in to the photographer’s presumably natural impulse to compose and light well sometimes okay and not okay other times?”

— David Byrne

124. “I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.”

— David Byrne

125. “The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.”

— David Byrne

126. “I’m not all about money, but, like most musicians, I am about survival.”

— David Byrne

127. “The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove.”

— David Byrne

128. “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.”

— David Byrne

129. “Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what’s going to happen in my life.”

— David Byrne

130. “Life tends to be an accumulation of a lot of mundane decisions, which often gets ignored.”

— David Byrne

131. “I’ve been in beautiful landscapes where one is tempted to whip out a camera and take a picture. I’ve learned to resist that.”

— David Byrne

132. “Mythologist Joseph Campbell, however, thought that the temple and cathedral are attractive because they spatially and acoustically recreate the cave, where early humans first expressed their spiritual yearnings.”

— David Byrne

133. “There’s always room for Jell-O.”

— David Byrne

134. “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.”

— David Byrne

135. “I still feel like if I can get a song to work with, say, a basic beat, a rhythm, some chord changes, and a melody, a vocal melody – if it works with that, then I feel it’s written and there’s something there.”

— David Byrne

136. “I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.”

— David Byrne

137. “Well, Marx is having a comeback. I hear him mentioned a lot in terms of the global financial situation and the general sense of injustice out there. A lot of economic experts in America refer to him without actually using the M word, but he’s around.”

— David Byrne

138. “When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.”

— David Byrne

139. “Always be skeptical about simplicity.”

— David Byrne

140. “In musical performances one can sense that the person on stage is having a good time even if they’re singing a song about breaking up or being in a bad way. For an actor this would be anathema, it would destroy the illusion, but with singing one can have it both ways. As a singer, you can be transparent and reveal yourself on stage, in that moment, and at the same time be the person whose story is being told in the song. Not too many kinds of performance allow that.”

— David Byrne

141. “I came to New York to be a fine artist – that was my ambition.”

— David Byrne

142. “I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it’s a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff.”

— David Byrne

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

— David Byrne

144. “Complete freedom is as much curse as boon; freedom within strict and well-defined confines is, to me, ideal.”

— David Byrne

145. “I think sometimes – not always – I write songs that are accessible.”

— David Byrne

146. “I don’t think I have grand visions that I will never achieve.”

— David Byrne

147. “Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex Pistols.”

— David Byrne

148. “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.”

— David Byrne

149. “The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world’s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.”

— David Byrne

150. “From what I’ve heard, Paris did a little bit more prep work as far as making bike lanes and all of that stuff. They really did it properly, which New York is getting to little by little.”

— David Byrne