Anybody with a sense of humor is going to put on my album and laugh from beginning to end.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

My luck is getting worse and worse. Last night, for instance, I was mugged by a quaker.

You can have the platinum album. But, you know, when you still feel like you haven’t quite found your place in the world, it kind of gives a crazy offset.

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

I enjoy driving on the sim, doing stuff like that, staying at home.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

I think ‚Hail to the Chief‘ has a nice ring to it.

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.

I need music. It’s like my heartbeat, so to speak. It keeps me going no matter what’s going on – bad games, press, whatever!

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.

When you’re coming up with new material, it’s not always gonna be good. The only way to learn is for it not to get a laugh, so you can adjust it and come back the next day to see if it’s working right. Next time, you might get a different laugh. You’re constantly rebuilding.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.

Believe it or not, I make myself laugh. Sometimes when I have thoughts or say some things that are funny, it just makes me laugh, and I don’t mind laughing at it before you guys do.

Of course, it does depend on the people, but sometimes I’m invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table like a musician who’ll play the piano after dinner, and I know you’re not really invited for yourself. You’re just an ornament.

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging – weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn’t want to do. I’m very grateful to him, actually.

I was very honored to get to be part of ‚American Idol.‘

So many girls come up and say to me, ‚I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn’t even know my town had a country-music station. Then I got your record, and now I’m obsessed.‘ That’s the coolest compliment to me.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he’s up there with Bryan Ferry.

People tried to change my concept of what music is. That music is work, but it’s not like that.

I’m pretty laid-back in real life. I just love hanging with my friends and making jokes. The jokes don’t stop – literally, all day.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it’s the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It’s probably the most important thing in a person.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Music is part of the life of fashion, too.

To be honest, I never really considered myself to be too much of an actress. So, whenever I get the chance to do music, I’m always, like, just in it. It’s like, ‚Oh my God, I finally get to do this. I’m so happy.‘

Your personal history is a part of what happens with your hands and your head as you play music.

All I really had was a suitcase and my drums. So I took them up to Seattle and hoped it would work.

If you check your ego at the door when it comes to comedy, you’ve got a pretty good shot at making a great movie that you can commit yourself to, you can jump off the proverbial cliff with, and have a great time, and the audiences respond to that.

My favorite artists always documented emotion. Marvin Gaye and Al Green and Sade and Aaliyah.

When you come to my show, I want it to feel like opera, like a theatre.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

Babies don’t need a vacation, but I still see them at the beach… it pisses me off! I’ll go over to a little baby and say ‚What are you doing here? You haven’t worked a day in your life!‘

It’s a privilege to serve the poor, to be servants of noble Africans, but I better belong in the rehearsal room or in the studio with my band. That’s where I want to be and I still wake up in the morning with melodies in my head.

A day without laughter is a day wasted.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

I love making music. That’s what I love to do. So I don’t feel like there’s any need to take a break unless I want to.

Songs are my diaries; they always have been. You have to put your trust in everyone because putting down those real, personal details and thoughts that make a song authentic also opens you right up. I am constantly misunderstood; a lot of people just don’t get me.

I hope that what you take away from my album is not just the music – which I did want to be fun, and I did want it to be about individuality, but please also take away from it that there’s no dream that’s too big.

Music is really driving my whole life.

A ‚scream‘ is always just that – a noise and not music.

I want more of my favorite artists or more of the guy that makes the anthems. I want more.

I was always making my friends laugh, but I never wanted the attention of the whole classroom.

Man, I’m the No. 1 living and breathing rock star. I am Axl Rose; I am Jim Morrison; I am Jimi Hendrix.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

That’s the one for my tombstone… Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?

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

My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved.

When I jumped off a roof in Cannes in a bee costume, I looked ridiculous. But this is my business; I have to humiliate myself.

You gotta make sure the listener is listening to you, so if you put it into a song, often times, if the song is striking enough, then you can really deliver the story most effectively while keeping the ear of the listener the whole time.

George Carlin’s album, ‚Class Clown,‘ came out when I was in high school. I memorized a lot of that album. I’d come home from school, put it on, and listen over and over. I started memorizing it. I don’t even know why. I loved it so much I memorized it.

There’s only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I’ll get married again.

My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.