I wanted to be a secret agent and an astronaut, preferably at the same time.

The arts don't exist in isolation.

To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that.

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

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

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

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

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 never listen to the radio unless I rent a car.

I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I'm someone else.

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

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.

I've rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.

That's the one for my tombstone... Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?

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.

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.

I find rebellion packaged by a major corporation a little hard to take seriously.

In retrospect, I can see I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching about. Ha! Like, that sure made sense!

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

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.

With music, you often don't have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don't know why.

Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Domination and monopoly is the name of the game in the web marketplace.

I meet young people who know me and are familiar with my stuff. They know the package. They might have cherry-picked five or six key tunes. That's how it seems to work. I sometimes wonder if they realise they are not getting the whole context.

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