David Byrne Quotes

A radio show recently did a beautiful eulogy of me.

I am built funny. Picture Mark Twain's head on Ichabod Crane's body. Now hold your mental picture to the light and crumple it.

I have been known as a crank, faddist, madman. Evidently the reputation is well deserved. For wherever I go, I draw to myself cranks, faddists, and madmen.

I think great humor lies in playing the truth of a situation.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

I'm most interested in finding the strangeness and irony in reality. That's my forte.

When you're laughing aloud at David Sedaris' every sentence, it's easy to miss the more serious side of what he's up to.

It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incient, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.

I need wrong to get laughs. I need a normal world so that I can be abnormal, and that's my problem. Comedians need prejudice.

I write what I think is funny and I write from a sense of popping a balloon or a sense of injustice, whether it's about yourself, or whether it's about something else. It's my worldview; it doesn't mean that everybody has to agree with it.

I think that a big part of comedy is being made fun of, and it is looking silly or looking stupid.

I think you can tell the human condition better through comedy.

I don't even take myself seriously, so how could I possibly take Hollywood seriously?

I've always thought something that makes you laugh, it makes you laugh because there's a little bit of truth to it.

I am a dork in disguise; I love doing stupid stuff.

I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.

I'm totally comfortable not being as funny as Larry David.

I laugh at absurdity hardest, then stories, then observations, then bearded men on roller skates.

Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned - not out of any wish of mine, but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me.

You could knock my teeth out and break my nose, and there'd be something funny about it to me.

I think a lot of humor is about distracting yourself. Pretend you're not trying to make it funny. Because for some reason the effort to be funny smells like sulphur in our culture.

Here lies a nuisance dedicated to sanity.

When you take a character seriously, there's more room for comedy because you're not aware of how absurd you are.

With Ricky Gervais, it's all shades of wrong, it's my kind of humor.

You know I used to be a heartthrob, and now I'm a coronary.