"There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior."

"Obviously, you go through a lot of emotional turmoil in a divorce."

"Suburban houses and tin sheds are often the objects of ridicule."

"Technology has allowed people to make records really cheap. You can make a record on a laptop."

"Forces that you might think are utterly unrelated to creativity can have a big impact. Technology, obviously, but environment, too. Even financial structures can affect the actual content of a song. The making of music is profoundly affected by the market."

"Domination and monopoly is the name of the game in the web marketplace."

"The city is a body and a mind - a physical structure as well as a repository of ideas and information."

"Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context."

"I encourage people not to be passive consumers of music and of culture in general. And feeling like, yeah, you can enjoy the products of professionals, but that doesn't mean you don't have to completely give up the reins and give up every connection to music or whatever it happens to be."

"I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff."

"I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same."

"I'm afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn't fit that will become unnecessary."

"I'm guarded; I don't talk much."

"It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music."

"The Heads were the only band on that scene that had a groove."

"When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another."

"I am an immigrant with a Green Card and, therefore, I am not eligible to vote in a federal election."

"I've never had writer's block."

"We tend to mistake music for the physical object."

"There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop."

"I think sometimes - not always - I write songs that are accessible."

"Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they're going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It's just a given law."

"The making of music is profoundly affected by the market."

"I think I had a mild case of Asperger's as a younger guy, but that typically just wears off after a while."

"I'm concerned that my technical skills have advanced to the point where I can get closer to what I'm aiming for, which is not such a good thing."

"I've noticed that when I am selling a lot of records, certain things become easier. I'm not talking about getting a table in a restaurant."

"Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community."

"I try to devote my afternoons to making music in my home studio, but it's a lot more fun hanging out with musicians and friends, and trying subtly to influence a band than making your own stuff."

"I don't listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don't have a car."

"The wage for most musicians is a modest amount, and that includes me some of the time."

"I've rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert."

"Music has to be sort of ignorable sometimes."

"When I was in high school, there were these British blues-rock-type bands with really good guitar players that would jam on one song for half an hour. And as much as I was amazed by some of those guitar players, seeing them prompted me to make a note that that's not something I could do."

"I meet young people who know me and are familiar with my stuff. They know the package. They might have cherry-picked five or six key tunes. That's how it seems to work. I sometimes wonder if they realise they are not getting the whole context."

"I think I had a mild case of Asperger's as a younger guy, but that typically just wears off after a while. For some people, anyway."

"Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don't have names for what they are or haven't identified them all. We can't pinpoint exactly what makes each city's people unique yet."

"I can't deny that label-support gave me a leg up - though not every successful artist needs it."

"Work aside, we come to New York for the possibility of interaction and inspiration."

"Occasionally, I hanker for the time when I sold more records, but I don't sit and drool about it. When I do look at early footage of Talking Heads, I realise I was just a wreck."

"Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren't as strong as some of the others, so you look better."

"I don't care how impossible it seems."

"The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique."

"I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?"

"Things fall apart, it's scientific."

"I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself."

"The more you know, the more you know you don't know and the more you know that you don't know."

"For years we have been taught not to like things. Finally somebody said it was OK to like things. This was a great relief. It was getting hard to go around not liking everything."

"You may say to yourself: "Well, how did I get here?"

"The better a singer's voice, the harder it is to believe what they're saying."

"To some extent I happily don't know what I'm doing. I feel that it's an artist's responsibility to trust that."