417 Quotes by David Byrne

In the early days, I might have gotten on stage and begun to sing as a desperate attempt to communicate, but now I found that singing was both a physical and emotional joy. It was sensuous, a pure pleasure, which didn't take away from the emotions being expressed—even if they were melancholic. Music can do that; you can enjoy singing about something sad.

The radio was shouting at you, pleading with you, and seducing you.

Maybe the difference between speech and music isn't all that great. We infer a lot from the tone of someone's voice, so imagine that aspect of speech pushed just a little further. The weird cadences of a Valley girl, for instance, might be viewed as a species of singing. The malls of Sherman Oaks are a setting for a kind of massed choir.

One forgets that part of one's performance is one's history—or sometimes the lack of it. You're playing against what an audience knows, what they expect. This seems to be true of all performers; there's baggage that gets carried into the venue that we can't see.

I also realized that there were lots of unacknowledged theater forms going on all around. Our lives are filled with performances that have been so woven into our daily routine that the artificial and performative aspect has slipped into invisibility.

Powerpoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it's a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good.

We have been taught not to like things. Finally somebody said it was OK to like things. This was a great relief.

There's a good chance that you might be inspired by ideas that originate outside of yourself.

Performers try harder.