David Byrne Quotes

Film is a very tight little box. If you don't fit in that box, you're gone. Television, there's more room to move around.

I used to think it was good to kind of work within your limitations.

There's more flexibility in the cartoon world than there is in video games. In video games, if I tweak a line, I could screw up the work of countless other people with my whim.

I have trouble working off things that are too preconceived, like storyboards.

I never write with constraints, which I don't know if it is a good thing or a bad thing.

In terms of having to uphold something, I don't need any added pressure. I need to be free in the work.

When you're working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.

In television, I don't feel constraints. I feel a lot freedom to maneuver.

So, what is creative freedom? We can make what we want, how we want. The only constraint is: not for any budget.

I want to tell stories, I don't really try to get boxed in by a specific genre.

Any definition which limits us is deplorable.

There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away.

Every ‘mistake’ is an opportunity in jazz.

If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.

Um, yeah, it's one of the things that you kind of have to accept at the very beginning, like I'm not going to try and be super [deep?] factor and no, I can only do it this way, because that's just not how this film's going to work. Like it's got to be sort of a mesh of reality and complete unreality and you kind of have to accept that and go with it.

With stand-up, you can be as freeform as you want to be. You can say what you want, how you want, at any moment without constraint.

The more constraints I have, the more opportunities I have to be creative to fix those constraints.

A tree that is unbending, is easily broken.

I had a little more freedom when I started sampling because you could actually do what you wanted to do.

It's impossible for me to feel like there's only one way to do a thing. There's nothing wrong with having one way of doing it, but I think it's a bad habit. I believe in range. Like, there's a lot of tunes that I play all the time-sometimes I hear 'em in a different register. And if you don't have complete freedom, or you won't let yourself get away from that one straight line, oh, my goodness, that's too horrible to even think about.

The reason I don't have a plan is because if I have a plan I'm limited to today's options.

The beauty of Netflix is that you can figure out a good part of the season before you get started. You're never in the hole of, "Oh, we've already released the first four episodes, and now we gotta make the finale, and we've already promised this."

Luckily with animation, they give you a lot more leeway than a live-action show.

I think I'm pretty committed to staying. I'm not committed to not doing big movies, but I am committed to continuing to make smaller movies, not for the sake of making smaller movies, but because I think it's really invigorating to just go work with people and know that it might be awful.

I’m going to break one of the rules of the trade here. I’m going to tell you some of the secrets of improvisation. Just remember—it’s always a good idea to follow the directions exactly the first time you try a recipe. But from then on, you’re on your own.