David Byrne – 40 Quotes

40 Quotes by David Byrne

We don’t make music – it makes us.

– David Byrne

Architecture theory is very interesting.

– David Byrne

I don’t like begging money from producers.

– David Byrne

I found music to be the therapy of choice.

– David Byrne

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

– David Byrne

I never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.

– David Byrne

I read the NY Times but I don’t trust all of it.

– David Byrne

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

– David Byrne

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

– David Byrne

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

– David Byrne

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

– David Byrne

Punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style.

– David Byrne

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

– David Byrne

You can know or not know how a car runs and still enjoy riding in a car.

– David Byrne

I don’t listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don’t have a car.

– David Byrne

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

– David Byrne

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

– David Byrne

Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community.

– David Byrne

With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

– David Byrne

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

– David Byrne

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

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

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

– David Byrne

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

– David Byrne

I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

– David Byrne

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

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.

– David Byrne

The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror – not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.

– David Byrne

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

Yeah, anybody can go in with two turntables and a microphone or a home studio sampler and a little cassette deck or whatever and make records in their bedrooms.

– David Byrne

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that’s pretty much all you can ask.

– David Byrne

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they’re going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It’s just a given law.

– David Byrne

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

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

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

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

I’ve rarely kept my distance from kind of – I don’t know if we can call it politics, but kind of, civic engagement and that kind of thing, except I tended to think, ‘Well, do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.’

– David Byrne

There’s a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you’re self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn’t so easy in a car, and you can’t cover as much ground walking.

– David Byrne

There’s something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There’s something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

– David Byrne

It’s a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn’t support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, ‘Well, yeah,’ but you start to think, ‘Why not, though?’ What makes one more valuable than another?

– David Byrne