David Byrne Quotes

I do explore the emotion every once in a while. I'd like to think you don't stop being creative once you get happy. My ultimate goal is to end up being happy. Most of the time.

I really believe that every character comes from the well of the artist.

I've really taken time to dive into my heart and my emotions a little more. I think, before, I was a little nervous to open up that box and go, 'What's in there,' you know? Now, that's what's made the best music, and that's what I've been able to pull out of parts of myself that I never knew existed.

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

A lot of Gorillaz songs were very personal. I mean, that's why it was interesting, because it wasn't music being made for a cartoon. It was something different. It was a much more emotional affair. I wasn't necessarily thinking in the third-person then.

I'm pretty self-conscious, so I tend to work in a way where I say what I need to say and get out rather than revisit things. It's kind of a collage style. I realized that it had more emotional weight that way. I'll always be in the developmental stages as far as being a songwriter.

Possibly the whole creative whirlwind of any musician's life is based on garnering and developing and absorbing more and more experience.

There are two parts to the creative endeavor: making something, then disseminating it.

If you're alive, you're a creative person.

One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.

Any human act that gives rise to something new is referred to as a creative act, regardless of whether what is created is a physical object or some mental or emotional construct that lives within the person who created it and is known only to him.

Without freedom, there is no creation.

You can't really do anything creative without a source of inspiration.

I create work, and I devote myself to the creative process, and I try to stay pure in that process and be worthy of the messages that I receive. You can't sit down and write 300 compositions in a three-month period and think that you're doing it all by yourself.

Some have the temperament and tastes of genius, without its creative power. They feel acutely, but express tamely.

No one can quite say what the creative process is. Because I have nothing to do with it of course. It's created in space. It's God's work, not mine.

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that.

By creating instinctively in auto mode we can uncover our true motives, our creative drive.

We are the clay, and you are Michelangelo. And we will be your masterpiece.

[Personal life] doesn't affect my creative process. It just gives me more subjects to talk about. Basically whatever you put in your music is how you want people to view you.

I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that's just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.

I think [music and acting], they are connected, all that stuff. It's your emotional self, is pretty much how you do it, I think, from whatever place you do it, whether you're acting or you're singing.