David Byrne

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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've got nothing to say most of the time.

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

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

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

You go to a festival, you know you're not going to play all new material at a festival. The audience is not there for that. I've made that mistake, but you find out pretty quickly.

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

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

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.

Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don't sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love getting out of my comfort zone.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

I think sometimes - not always - I write songs that are accessible.

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

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

I couldn't take pictures of green rolling hills.

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.

Sometimes I write stuff that strangely predicts what's going to happen in my life.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.

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.

People will remember you better if you always wear the same outfit.

I don't like begging money from producers.

I'm proud of 'Stop Making Sense,' but it's a little bit of an albatross; I can't compete with it, but I can't ignore it either.

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

Real beauty knocks you a little bit off kilter.

When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that's not something I could do.

I can't deny that label-support gave me a leg up - though not every successful artist needs it.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that's pretty much all you can ask.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they're going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It's just a given law.

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

I always think the everyday is more relevant than anything too grand because we all have to deal with it.

I came to New York to be a fine artist - that was my ambition.

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 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.

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

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

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

I'm very much into making lists and breaking things apart into categories.

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

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.

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

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.

Physical contact is a human necessity.

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.

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.

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

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.

The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

I think I had a mild case of Asperger's as a younger guy, but that typically just wears off after a while.

I think I had a mild case of Asperger's as a younger guy, but that typically just wears off after a while. For some people, anyway.

Everythings intentional. Its just filling in the dots.

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

I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

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

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.

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

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.

Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop.

Some folks believe that hardship breeds artistic creativity. I don't buy it. One can put up with poverty for a while when one is young, but it will inevitably wear a person down.

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

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

As everything becomes digitized, there's the idea that things that can't be digitized become more valuable.

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

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 cycled when I was at high school, then reconnected with bikes in New York in the late '70s. It was a good way of getting around the clubs and galleries of the Lower East Side and Soho.

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.

Having unlimited choices can paralyze you creatively.

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.

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.

We don't make music - it makes us.

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

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

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.