David Byrne quotes:

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Well, Marx is having a comeback. I hear him mentioned a lot in terms of the global financial situation and the general sense of injustice out there. A lot of economic experts in America refer to him without actually using the M word, but he's around.

Work aside, we come to New York for the possibility of interaction and inspiration.

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.

I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.

I've been in beautiful landscapes where one is tempted to whip out a camera and take a picture. I've learned to resist that.

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?

Do creative, social, and civic attitudes change depending on where we live? Yes, I think so.

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

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

I remember talking with Arcade Fire after their first record, when they were getting all kinds of offers from major labels, and I don't think I gave them any advice. They survived that whole onslaught pretty well anyway without me.

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.

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

One of the benefits of playing to small audiences in small clubs for a few years is that you're allowed to fail.

I certainly agree that putting everything into little genres is counterproductive. You're not going to get too many surprises if you only focus on the stuff that fits inside the box that you know.

Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren't as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don't have names for what they are or haven't identified them all. We can't pinpoint exactly what makes each city's people unique yet.

Domination and monopoly is the name of the game in the web marketplace.

The physical sensation of gliding with the wind in your face is exhilarating. That automatic activity of pedalling, when you have to be awake but not think too much, allows you to let subconscious thoughts bubble up, and things seem to just sort themselves out. And the adrenaline wakes you up if you weren't properly alert.

I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn't mean you don't have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be.

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

I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.

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.

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

Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

Life tends to be an accumulation of a lot of mundane decisions, which often gets ignored.

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

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

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context.

I'd like to be known for more than being the guy in the big suit.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don't censor yourself, you end up with what you're most concerned about, but you haven't filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

I am an immigrant with a Green Card and, therefore, I am not eligible to vote in a federal election.

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

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

I'm concerned that my technical skills have advanced to the point where I can get closer to what I'm aiming for, which is not such a good thing.

I've got nothing to say most of the time.

The voting booth joint is a great leveler; the whole neighborhood - rich, poor, old, young, decrepit and spunky - they all turn out in one day.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

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.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

I've never had writer's block.

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

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?

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

When things get so absurd and so stupid and so ridiculous that you just can't bear it, you cannot help but turn everything into a joke.

People in Latin America... love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.

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.

Television sounded really different than the Ramones sounded really different than us sounded really different than Blondie sounded really different than the Sex Pistols

Body odor is the window to the soul.

All you needed was a couple of instruments and a few chords and you could be on an indie label.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

Everything's intentional. It's just filling in the dots.

This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around.

Frank Lloyd Wright... his things were beautiful but not very functional.

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.

The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

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

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.

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

Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?

When you fall in love, you feel like a missing piece of a puzzle that's been found.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

...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.

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

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.

I couldn't take pictures of green rolling hills.

In retrospect, I can see I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!

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

In a certain way, it's the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

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

That's the thing about pictures: they seduce you.

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

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

Suburban houses and tin sheds are often the objects of ridicule.

The city is a body and a mind - a physical structure as well as a repository of ideas and information.

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.

Performing is a thing in itself, a distinct skill, different from making recordings. And for those who can do it, it's a way to make a living.

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

That's the one for my tombstone... Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?

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.

London's tempo is 122.86 beats per minute.

I've made money, and I've been ripped off. I've had creative freedom, and I've been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will.

From what I've heard, Paris did a little bit more prep work as far as making bike lanes and all of that stuff. They really did it properly, which New York is getting to little by little.

There's a pervasive feeling that when somebody sings a song and records a song on a record, that it's their true feeling.

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.

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

I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

Yeah, I like to keep myself interested - I'll kind of throw myself into some area that I don't completely know or understand, that I'm not adept at, so I'm forced to swim in order to stay afloat. There's a good feeling that comes from that.

I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I do use a bike to get from place to place in Manhattan, a little bit of Brooklyn.

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.

I don't think people are going to switch over to bikes because it's good for them or because it's politically correct. They're going to do it because it gets them from A to B faster.

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

It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

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 have trouble imagining what I could do that's beyond the practicality of what I can do.

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

Some artists and indie musicians see Spotify fairly positively - as a way of getting noticed, of getting your music out there where folks can hear it risk-free.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Cycling can be lonely, but in a good way. It gives you a moment to breathe and think, and get away from what you're working on.