David Byrne Quotes

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine.

Ultimately, I'm not so sure that, as a person, I'm all that interesting.

I am a person. I am not a soap opera.

People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact what we really are.

The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

Of course I'm a fake. We're all fakes on this whole world, pretending to be something we're not. We are not just bodies walking around, not just atoms, molecules. We are unkillable, undestroyable ideas of the IS, no matter how much we believe otherwise.

Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.

The personality is defined by its inconsistencies, not its consistencies. It's what makes us unique and who we are.

MAN, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be.

The identity cannot be compartmentalized; it cannot be split in halves or thirds, nor have any clearly defined set of boundaries. I do not have several identities, I only have one, made of all the elements that have shaped its unique proportions.

Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?

The overall commentary on what I'm doing is saying, 'Hey look! I get to create whatever persona I want to, and it's all up to me. And the truth is, we are all - basically the universe - pretending to be humans for a brief moment of time. With a little self-induced amnesia.

When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.

Listen,” F. Jasmine said. “What I’ve been trying to say is this. Doesn’t it strike you as strange that I am I, and you are you? I am F. Jasmine Addams. And you are Berenice Sadie Brown. And we can look at each other, and touch each other, and stay together year in and year out in the same room. Yet always I am I, and you are you. And I can’t ever be anything else but me, and you can ever be anything else but you. Have you ever thought of that? And does it seem to you strange?

No man knows himself as an original.

I am me, whatever that means. I am conscious.

I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

I don't know whether I am different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

Every kid goes to school full of questions about meaning. You know, 'What's my place in the universe? What does it mean to be a human being? What are human beings?' Existing courses cannot help you answer those questions. They can't even help you ask them.