David Byrne Quotes

Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense.

Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

Poetry keeps longing alive.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

Regularity, order, desire for perfection destroy art. Irregularity is the basis of all art.

Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

I learn life from the poets.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive.

Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.

The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.

I got saved by poetry. And I got saved by the beauty of the world.

Song is not Truth, not Wisdom, but the rose Upon Truths lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes.

A poem is the realization of love. . . .

I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.