David Byrne Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

Body odor is the window to the soul.

I found music to be the therapy of choice.

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

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.

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.

The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means - allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece - when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there's an instant "Aha!".

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

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

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

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

Most of our lives aren't that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

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.

The arts don't exist in isolation.

I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.

PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows.

Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they're intended to be used for.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, it's pretty hard not to be completely cynical these days.

I couldn't take pictures of green rolling hills.

...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.