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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

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Human Beings Have The

David Byrne

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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.

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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.

I Love Writing. I Don't Claim To Be Great At It. Occasionally I Get A Good Sentence Off. But I Love The Activity.

I Try Never To Wear My Own Clothes, I Pretend I'm Someone Else

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.

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.

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.

A Bike Is The World's Most Used Form Of Transportation

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's Not Always Been A Happy Marriage. I Guess I Wanted A Quick Fix.

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.

People Hear About Stuff From Their Friends Or A Magazine Or A Newspaper.

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 Arts Don't Exist In Isolation.

People Will Do Odd Things If You Give Them Money.

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.

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.

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.

I Like To Combine The Dramatic Emotional Warmth Of Strings With The Grooves And Body Business Of Drums And Bass.

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.

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 Music You Would Use To Get A Girl Into Bed. If Anything, You're Going To Frighten Her Off.

I'm No Lance Armstrong, But I Do Use A Bike To Get From Place To Place In Manhattan, A Little Bit Of Brooklyn.

Sometimes I Write Stuff That Strangely Predicts What's Going To Happen In My Life.

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.

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.

...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.

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.

Most Of Our Lives Aren't That Exciting, But The Drama Is Still Going On In The Small Details.

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.

I Subscribe To The Myth That An Artist's Creativity Comes From Torment. Once That's Fixed, What Do You Draw On?

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.

I Resent The Implication That I'm Less Of A Musician And A Worse Person For Not Appreciating Certain Works.

One Of The Benefits Of Playing To Small Audiences In Small Clubs For A Few Years Is That You're Allowed To Fail.

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.

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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

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.

Singing Is A Trick To Get People To Listen To Music For Longer Than They Would Ordinarily.

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.

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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.

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.

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People Use Irony As A Defense Mechanism.

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I Couldn't Take Pictures Of Green Rolling Hills.

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Why Not Invest In The Future Of Music, Instead Of Building Fortresses To Preserve Its Past?

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To Some Extent I Happily Don't Know What I'm Doing. I Feel That It's An Artist's Responsibility To Trust That.

I Knew I Wanted To Have A Doll Of Myself On The Cover. I Thought, I Wanna See Myself As A Ken Doll.

It's Like 60 Minutes On Acid.

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I Wanted To Be A Secret Agent And An Astronaut, Preferably At The Same Time.

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I Always Think The Everyday Is More Relevant Than Anything Too Grand Because We All Have To Deal With It.

I Find Rebellion Packaged By A Major Corporation A Little Hard To Take Seriously.

The More You Know, The More You Know You Don't Know And The More You Know That You Don't Know.

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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.

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I Don't Care How Impossible It Seems.

Software Constraints Are Only Confining If You Use Them For What They're Intended To Be Used For.

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.

I Didn't Have Any Agenda Or Plan When I Started Writing Stuff.

Yeah, It's Pretty Hard Not To Be Completely Cynical These Days.

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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.

Frank Lloyd Wright... His Things Were Beautiful But Not Very Functional.

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.

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. It Has To Be Mediated With Some Skill And Craft, In Order To Communicate It To A Second, A Third, Or A Fourth Person. That Doesn't Make It Any Less Real. And It Doesn't Make It Any Less True. But It Does Mean That, Yeah, It's The Combination That Makes It Work.

The Making Of Music Is Profoundly Affected By The Market.

Punk Was Defined By An Attitude Rather Than A Musical Style.

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Interviewer: If I Gave You Fifty Dollars, Right Now, What Would You Do With It?david Byrne: I Would Get Something To Eat.

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Emotional Turmoil

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Always Be Skeptical About Simplicity.

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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.

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We Don't Make Music, It Makes Us

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To Shake Your Rump Is To Be Environmentally Aware.

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.

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I Came To New York To Be A Fine Artist - That Was My Ambition.

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Cycling Can Be Lonely, But In A Good Way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've Rarely Seen Video Screens Used Well In A Music Concert.

I Couldn't Talk To People Face To Face, So I Got On Stage And Started Screaming And Squealing And Twitching.

The Better A Singer's Voice, The Harder It Is To Believe What They're Saying.

I'm Afraid That Everything Will Get Homogenized And Be The Same

There Was An Op-ed Piece In The New York Times By An Evolutionary Biologist Or Somebody - Which Was A Curious Place For The Opinion To Come From - And He Said That There's No Such Thing As A Completely Free, Uncensored Medium, That People Censor Themselves All The Time, In Deference To Hurting Other People's Feelings, Or Offending Other Groups, Or In Their Own, Not To Provoke A Fight. And You Do Self-censor Certain Things, And It's Not Necessarily A Bad Thing. That's Just The Way Human Social Interaction Works.

Schools Are For Training People How To Listen To Other People.

I Don't Believe That Crime, Danger And Poverty Make For Good Art. That's Bullshit.

My Personal Feeling Is That Human Beings Have This Incredible Capacity For Denial.

Life Tends To Be An Accumulation Of A Lot Of Mundane Decisions, Which Often Gets Ignored.

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.

The Wage For Most Musicians Is A Modest Amount, And That Includes Me Some Of The Time.

This Ain't No Party, This Ain't No Disco, This Ain't No Fooling Around.

A Lot Of That Worked Itself Out In The Recording.

Another Elvis Will Not Come Along. He Got Wasted, But It's Alright.

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.

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.

When We Started, A Lot Of Bands Sounded Really Different From One Another.

I Love Getting Out Of My Comfort Zone.

Maybe It's Naïve, But I Would Love To Believe That Once You Grow To Love Some Aspect Of A Culture-its Music, For Instance -you Can Never Again Think Of The People Of That Culture As Less Than Yourself. I Would Like To Believe That If I Am Deeply Moved By A Song Originating From Some Place Other Than My Own Homeland, Then I Have In Some Way Shared An Experience With The People Of That Culture. I Have Been Pleasantly Contaminated. I Can Identify In Some Small Way With It And Its People.

Cycling Is A Joy And Faster Than Many Other Modes Of Transport, Depending On The Time Of Day. It Clears The Head.

I'm Just An Advertisement For A Version Of Myself.

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!".

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.

That's The One For My Tombstone... Here Lies David Byrne. Why The Big Suit?

Body Odor Is The Window To The Soul.

Window To The Soul

I'd Like To Be Known For More Than Being The Guy In The Big Suit.

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.

I Like A Good Story And I Also Like Staring At The Sea-- Do I Have To Choose Between The Two?

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. So I Intentionally Don't Get Involved With Arranging Stuff Or Fussing Over The Sounds And The Edits And The Beats Too Much, At Least Not In The Beginning, Because I Feel Like Then You Can Fool Yourself That You've Got Something There, When You Might Not.

I’m Not All About Money, But, Like Most Musicians, I Am About Survival.

When You Fall In Love, You Feel Like A Missing Piece Of A Puzzle That's Been Found.

Falling In Love

You Create A Community With Music, Not Just At Concerts But By Talking About It With Your Friends.

London's Tempo Is 122.86 Beats Per Minute.

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.

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.

When Everything Is Worth Money, Then Money Is Worth Nothing.

You May Say To Yourself: "well, How Did I Get Here?"

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.

Physical Contact Is A Human Necessity.

People Will Remember You Better If You Always Wear The Same Outfit.

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 Have Trouble Imagining What I Could Do That's Beyond The Practicality Of What I Can Do.

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Sergio Aragones

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