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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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David Byrne
Age: 119
Born: 1905
Born: May 6
Actor
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More quotes by David Byrne

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Often I don't know what the song means until it's finished. Sometimes months later. I don't think that's bad. It implies that I don't know what I'm doing but-I think if you're able to follow your instincts, then that's knowing what you're doing.
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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.
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We don't make music, it makes us
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A lot of cities are making a real effort, neighborhood by neighborhood, to make themselves into a place where life can be pretty good.
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I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself.
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I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house... love is kind of big. I have written a love song, though. In this film, I sing it to a lamp.
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London's tempo is 122.86 beats per minute.
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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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It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.
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I'd been keeping tour diaries, and especially when I go somewhere where I felt the experience might be interesting, like Eastern Europe or South America or whatever, where the whole perception of what I was doing there and stuff that I was seeing and music I was hearing, I could put all that into a diary.
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A lot of people, musically anyway, have realized that they can do it, and there's an audience for it at least in their own country, and often thought a lot of countries have a diaspora that breaks out all over the place, so they have a pretty wide audience.
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I couldn't take pictures of green rolling hills.
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To shake your rump is to be environmentally aware.
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When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that's when the details take on larger meanings.
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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.
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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.
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We live in ugly times.
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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?
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We are like the birds. We adapt. We sing.
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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.
David Byrne