David Byrne Creative Quotations

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'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.

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.

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 have no nostalgia for the location whatsoever. I appreciate what Hilly did. It's about his policy. It's about those creative business decisions that he made. It's not about the building.