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People use irony as a defense mechanism.

David Byrne

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David Byrne
Age: 119
Born: 1905
Born: May 6
Actor
Artist
Blogger
Composer
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Film Score Composer
Guitarist
Music Journalist
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Photographer
Mechanism
Irony
Defense
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People

More quotes by David Byrne

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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.
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I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself.
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I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.
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When you fall in love, you feel like a missing piece of a puzzle that's been found.
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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.
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I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?
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My take is that the kind of complexity which says we can always generate complexity from simple interactions following for example rules.
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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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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.
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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?
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It's like 60 Minutes on acid.
David Byrne
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The idea of making music from an imaginary culture was to give ourselves a set of restrictions and parameters within which to work. Otherwise, we might have just gone on all kinds of creative detours, some of which might have been interesting. But better we confine ourselves to something.
David Byrne
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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.
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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.
David Byrne
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There's more good music being made now than ever before.
David Byrne
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Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily.
David Byrne
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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.
David Byrne
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Most of our lives aren't that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.
David Byrne
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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.
David Byrne
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Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they're intended to be used for.
David Byrne