David Byrne

“I resent the implication that I'm less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works.”

“I've noticed that when I am selling a lot of records, certain things become easier. I'm not talking about getting a table in a restaurant.”

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

“I subscribe to the myth that an artist's creativity comes from torment. Once that's fixed, what do you draw on?”

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

“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.”

“It's a bit like sympathetic magic in a way: the usual Western presumption that 'primitive' rituals mimic what they desire to achieve--that phallic objects might be believed to increase male potency and playacting rainfall might somehow bring it about. I am suspicious of such obvious connections and I suspect that the connections among things, people, and processes can be equally irrational. 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.”

“Do I wear a helmet? Ugh. I do when I'm riding through a precarious part of town, meaning Midtown traffic. But when I'm riding on secure protected lanes or on the paths that run along the Hudson or through Central Park - no, I don't wear the dreaded helmet then.”

“I knew I wanted to have a doll of myself on the cover. I thought, I wanna see myself as a Ken doll.”

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

“The assumption is that your personal life has to be a mess to create, but how much chaos can you allow in before it takes over?”

“Probably the reason it's a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you're getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you're going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there's a kind of bundle.”

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

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

“I've been asking myself: 'Why put together these things - CDs, albums?' The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part.”

“Cycling is a joy and faster than many other modes of transport, depending on the time of day. It clears the head.”

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

“I ride my bike almost every day here in New York. It's getting safer to do so, but I do have to be fairly alert when riding on the streets as opposed to riding on the Hudson River bike path or similar protected lanes.”

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

“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.”