David Byrne Quotes

“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...”

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't care how impossible it seems.”

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

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

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

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

“Some of you people just about missed it.”

“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.”

“Stop making sense.”

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

“Things fall apart, it's scientific.”

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

“All that interconnectedness that facilitated much of the explosion of megawealth over the last decade also facilitated the interpenetration of everything, so no one or no building is truly isolated and 'safe' anymore. Safety is in getting along.”

“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. ”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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. ”

“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.”

“There's always room for Jell-O.”

“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.”

“How much of the audience’s fun was sacrificed in the effort to redefine the social parameters of the concert hall — it sounds almost mas*chistic of the upper crust, curtailing their own liveliness, but I guess they had their priorities.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Music isn't fragile.”