109+ David Byrne Quotes On Music, Religion And Diversity

David Byrne is a Scottish musician, singer-songwriter, record producer, actor, and filmmaker. He is best known as the frontman of the American new wave band Talking Heads, which was active between 1975 and 1991. Byrne has released solo recordings and worked with various media including film, photography, opera, and non-fiction. Following is our collection on famous quotes by David Byrne on love, music, religion.

Top 10 David Byrne Quotes

1. Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex Pistols
2. 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.
3. Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.
4. I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?
5. It's not music you would use to get a girl into bed. If anything, you're going to frighten her off.
6. 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.
7. When you fall in love, you feel like a missing piece of a puzzle that's been found.
8. There's an old joke that you know you're in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it's the other way around you're in hell.
9. Body odor is the window to the soul.
10. The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

David Byrne Short Quotes

• This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around.
• Another Elvis will not come along. He got wasted, but it's alright.
• Schools are for training people how to listen to other people.
• Science's job is to map our ignorance.
• It's like 60 Minutes on acid.
• We are like the birds. We adapt. We sing.
• I don't care how impossible it seems.
• The more you know, the more you know you don't know and the more you know that you don't know.
• London's tempo is 122.86 beats per minute.
• A bike is the world's most used form of transportation

David Byrne Quotes About Music

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

As I define it, rock and roll is dead. The attitude isn't dead, but the music is no longer vital. It doesn't have the same meaning. The attitude, though, is still very much alive -- and it still informs other kinds of music. — David Byrne

I'm really curious how the private listening - iPods, people listening on their phones - how that might eventual effect music. There'll be a whole genre of music that really works on a kind of one to one headphone or earbud level but doesn't really work when you play it in a room. — David Byrne

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

There are a lot of people that don't scour websites regularly or read music reviews. They need whatever, the other kinds of stuff, whether it's an appearance on Lettterman or posters or ads. They need to kind of be hit more in the face and be told that there's something new out there. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

What's been missing from digital music sales has been the possibility of added depth. In a printed package one can only include so many images and so much text - for example - but digitally it's wide open. — David Byrne

Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily. — David Byrne

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

We don't make music, it makes us — David Byrne

David Byrne Quotes About Money

People will do odd things if you give them money. — David Byrne

When everything is worth money, then money is worth nothing. — David Byrne

I’m not all about money, but, like most musicians, I am about survival. — David Byrne

David Byrne Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — David Byrne

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

By the time Talking Heads were starting, my feeling was to throw out everything and start from scratch onstage; strip it down to as close to zero as you can get and then you can make it yours. — David Byrne

We've gone through the urban renewal cycle in the '60s and '70s that really did a lot of damage to the fabric of urban life - neighborhoods bulldozed and highways pushed through, and all that kind of stuff that really destroyed the kind of social underpinning and the kind of mom and pop stores and all the stuff that makes a community viable. — David Byrne

What's been missing from digital music sales has been the possibility of added depth. In a printed package one can only include so many images and so much text - for example - but digitally it's wide open. For the most part at the moment we get less information for slightly less money - though we could be getting a lot more. — David Byrne

In the future, women will have breasts all over. In the future, it will be a relief to find a place without culture. In the future, plates of food will have names and titles. In the future, we will all drive standing up. In the future, love will be taught on television and by listening to pop songs. — David Byrne

I wave to the double-decker buses from my bike, but the passengers never wave back. Why? Am I not an attraction? — David Byrne

People will remember you better if you always wear the same outfit. — David Byrne

I came to New York to be a fine artist - that was my ambition. — David Byrne

Always be skeptical about simplicity. — David Byrne

Things fall apart, it's scientific. — David Byrne

I can't tell one from the other:I find you or you find me?There was a time before we were born If someone asks, this is where I'll be. — David Byrne

I've changed my music from time to time so I'm hoping that I can completely change my life from time to time, too. Like live in another land, in another place, and just get completely soaked up in another way of being. Could be in this country or another country, somewhere were you can be reborn a number of times not just creatively, but personally as well. I guess I want to go through life as more than one person. — David Byrne

I think that if they want people to listen to ten or twelve songs, they have to give the listener a reason to listen to ten or twelve songs or to buy ten or twelve and listen to the whole thing instead of just pulling one or two for their iPod or their computer. — David Byrne

I don't think I have grand visions that I will never achieve. — David Byrne

I love writing. I don't claim to be great at it. Occasionally I get a good sentence off. But I love the activity. — David Byrne

A dissection of music perception and creation that starts slowly and inexorably builds to a grand finish. I loved reading that listening to music coordinates more disparate parts of the brain than almost anything else--and playing music uses even more! Despite illuminating a lot of what goes on this book doesn't "spoil" enjoyment- it only deepens the beautiful mystery that is music. — David Byrne

I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I'm someone else — David Byrne

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

Interviewer: If I gave you fifty dollars, right now, what would you do with it?David Byrne: I would get something to eat. — David Byrne

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

Technology has altered the way music sounds, how it’s composed and how we experience it. It has also flooded the world with music. The world is awash with (mostly) recorded sounds. We used to have to pay for music or make it ourselves; playing, hearing and experiencing it was exceptional, a rare and special experience. Now hearing it is ubiquitous, and silence is the rarity that we pay for and savor. — David Byrne

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware. — David Byrne

It's more about the stuff you think about when you're getting from place to place on a bicycle than it is about actually riding the bicycle. — David Byrne

It seemed [there are] musical nodes on the planet where cultures meet and mix, sometimes as a result of unfortunate circumstances, like slavery or something else, in places like New Orleans and Havana and Brazil. And those are places where the European culture and indigenous culture and African culture all met and lived together, and some new kind of culture and especially music came out of that. — David Byrne

A lot of that worked itself out in the recording. — David Byrne

With a lot of what we take to be true feelings, especially on pop records, we feel them because they're cleverly crafted. And because the words are written by somebody who knows how to craft words and draw on those things and convey those feelings. That doesn't mean they're dishonest. But it also doesn't mean that it's all just pure primitive emotion spilling out. — David Byrne

I don't believe that crime, danger and poverty make for good art. That's bullshit. — David Byrne

I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house... love is kind of big. I have written a love song, though. In this film, I sing it to a lamp. — David Byrne

My personal feeling is that human beings have this incredible capacity for denial. — David Byrne

A little touch of chaos and danger makes a city sexy. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

Is giving in to the photographer's presumably natural impulse to compose and light well sometimes okay and not okay other times? — David Byrne

I read the NY Times but I don't trust all of it — David Byrne

I'm being probably naïve, but I would like to think that once something moves you and you have an emotional involvement with it, and you see some relevance in it to your own life, then it's a little bit harder, maybe, to look at the people that produced it as being just exotic others that don't have any connection to you or relevance to you. — David Byrne

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

Rich people will travel great distances to look at poor people. — David Byrne

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

I should watch network television, or daytime television, because I'm not sure who all these people are who keep getting referred to in blogs and newspapers. I better get myself culturally attuned. — David Byrne

Metal buildings are the dream that Modern Architects had at the beginning of this century. It has finally come true, but they themselves don't realize it. That's because it doesn't take an Architect to build a metal building. You just order them out of a catalog - comes with a bunch of guys who put it together in a couple of days, maybe a week. And there you go - you're all set to go into business - just slap a sign out front. — David Byrne

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

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

Crime is a job. Sex is a job. Growing up is a job. School is a job. Going to parties is a job. Religion is a job. Being creative is a job — David Byrne

If I'm feeling that I have an angle or something to say or something where in a way I'm having a conversation with myself, that's immensely pleasurable. — David Byrne

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

A lot of cities are making a real effort, neighborhood by neighborhood, to make themselves into a place where life can be pretty good. — David Byrne

I think sometimes I get carried away, like I'm speaking to an imaginary audience rather than just trying to figure something out for myself. Ideally, I try to balance that - that I'm asking these questions of myself, how does this work, why does this happen, what's going on here. — David Byrne

I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics. — David Byrne

As everything becomes digitized, there's the idea that things that can't be digitized become more valuable. — David Byrne

Punk. . .was more a kind of do-it-yourself, anyone-can-do-it attitude. If you only played two notes on the guitar, you could figure out a way to make a song out of that, and that's what it was all about. — David Byrne

Personally, being somewhat envious of Richard's (Thompson) songwriting and guitar playing, it's somewhat satisfying he's not yet achieved household-name status. It serves him right for being so good. — David Byrne

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

I'd been keeping tour diaries, and especially when I go somewhere where I felt the experience might be interesting, like Eastern Europe or South America or whatever, where the whole perception of what I was doing there and stuff that I was seeing and music I was hearing, I could put all that into a diary. — David Byrne

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

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

I have something to say about the difference between American and European cities, but I forgot what it was. I have it written down at home somewhere. — David Byrne

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

Human beings have the incredible capacity for denial. I think they do. And although it's really hard to believe, I have my doubts. But my feeling is that first they have to convince themselves. First they have to justify this stuff to themselves and if they can do that, even for just the moment that it's coming out their mouth, then they can kind of mouth it with kind of believable sincerity, even if some of us. — David Byrne

Book learning, or intelligence of one sort, doesn't guarantee you intelligence of another sort.You can behave just as stupidly with a good college education. — David Byrne

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. — David Byrne

The most common music that you hear anywhere in the world now basically has its roots in that union that happened in the last century, or in the century before that. That kind of music that's groove or beat oriented just didn't exist in lots of cultures before that. — David Byrne

I'm just wearing regular street clothes. Pretty much all the time. In the summertime, or when it gets warm out, shorts and sandals or something like that. Stuff that I don't mind getting a little sweaty. — David Byrne

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

My opinion is that somebody certainly has the right to do cartoons that make fun of somebody else's religion. But to reprint them just to provoke a fight and just to provoke it like thumbing your nose at someone else and going, "What are you gonna do about it?" — David Byrne

We do express our emotions, our reactions to events, breakups and infatuations, but the way we do that - the art of it - is in putting them into prescribed forms or squeezing them into new forms that perfectly fit some emerging context. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively; we internalize it, like birds do. And it’s a joy to sing, like the birds do. — 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. — David Byrne

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one's own town. — David Byrne

I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same — David Byrne

One knew in advance that life in New York would not be easy‚ but there were cheap rents in cold-water lofts without heat‚ and the excitement of being here made up for those hardships. I didn't move to New York to make a fortune. — David Byrne

...if photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless. — David Byrne

We're on a road to nowhere, come on inside. Takin' that ride to nowhere, we'll take that ride. I'm feelin' okay this mornin', and you know, we're on the road to paradise, here we go, here we go. — David Byrne

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

Music is relegated to an underground, relatively obscure group of listeners. It's partly because of the nature of the medium. With a piece of visual art, you can look at something ugly, brutal and in your face, but it's kind of - there it is. It doesn't take you over in the same way that putting on the music at a certain volume does. — David Byrne

My take is that the kind of complexity which says we can always generate complexity from simple interactions following for example rules. — David Byrne

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

The world isn't logical, it's a song. — David Byrne

Life Lessons by David Byrne

1. David Byrne's life is a reminder that it's important to stay true to yourself and your vision, no matter how unconventional it may be.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of collaboration and working with others to create something bigger than yourself.
3. Lastly, his career is a testament to the power of hard work and dedication - no matter how many times you fail, keep pushing and you will eventually succeed.