David Bowie quotes:

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  • Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left.

  • What I do is I write mainly about very personal and rather lonely feelings, and I explore them in a different way each time. You know, what I do is not terribly intellectual. I'm a pop singer for Christ's sake. As a person, I'm fairly uncomplicated.

  • I'm very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn't think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that's happening to me. I'm rather surprised at who I am, because I'm actually like my dad!

  • The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.

  • It would be my guess that Madonna is not a very happy woman. From my own experience, having gone through persona changes like that, that kind of clawing need to be the center of attention is not a pleasant place to be.

  • The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

  • I don't have stylistic loyalty. That's why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

  • Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I'm referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods presence in his life. He is the 21st century man.

  • I'm not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with potential of a superman. I'm living on.

  • The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.

  • When I'm stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.

  • I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.

  • On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

  • I think Mick Jagger would be astounded and amazed if he realized that to many people he is not a sex symbol, but a mother image.

  • I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.

  • There's a good television programme called 'Disco 2.' It's quite good but again it's average, average. It's all on a down play. You know we've got this thing in England to be hip is to speak very down - like John Peel. And that just about sums up England. They don't realize when they talk like that, then that is what they represent - absolutely.

  • Tony Visconti and I had been wanting to work together again for a few years now. Both of us had fairly large commitments and for a long time we couldn't see a space in which we could get anything together.

  • I've never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.

  • Who'll love Aladdin Sane? Battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise.

  • I have someone who loves me for me. Seriously, it REALLY helps!' Bowie on marrying Iman

  • I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

  • I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

  • Radio in England is nonexistent. It's very bad English use of a media system, typically English use.

  • But I'm pretty good with collaborative thinking. I work well with other people.

  • I've always regretted that I never was able to talk openly with my parents, especially with my father. I've heard and read so many things about my family that I can no longer believe anything; every relative I question has a completely different story from the last.

  • It's not the side-effects of the cocaine - I'm thinking that it must be love.It's too late to be grateful,It's too late to be hateful,It's too late to be late again,The European cannon is here."

  • I don't expect the human race to progress in too many areas. However, having a child with an ear infection makes one hugely grateful for antibiotics.

  • He says he's a beautician and sells you nutrition, and keeps all your dead hair for making underwear.

  • It's true -- I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me.

  • It is entirely possible to create something totally artificial within the realms of rock and roll.

  • Some make you sing and some make you scream. One makes you wish that you'd never been seen. But there's a shop on the corner that's selling papier mache, making bullet-proof faces, Charlie Manson, Cassius Clay. If you want it, boys, get it here, thing.

  • There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It's always been my way of expressing what for me is inexpressible by any other means.

  • Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

  • If I put faith in medication, if I can smile a crooked smile, if I can talk on television, if I can walk an empty mile.

  • I'm bemused by the whole Robbie Williams aspect of British pop. Posh Spice? It all looks like cruise ship entertainment to me.

  • Listen to me, don't listen to me. Talk to me, don't talk to me.

  • I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I'm not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

  • One day in Berlin ... Eno came running in and said, 'I have heard the sound of the future.' ... he puts on 'I Feel Love', by Donna Summer ... He said, 'This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.' Which was more or less right.

  • Oooh, fashion, we are the goon squad and were coming to town, beep beep.

  • Nearly all the synth work on Heathen is mine and some of the piano.

  • I haven't changed my views much since I was about 12, really, I've just got a 12-year-old mentality.When I was in school I had a brother who was into Kerouac and he gave me On The Road to read when I was 12 years old. That's still been a big influence.

  • See the mice in their million hordes From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads.

  • I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

  • A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle. The rock stars have assimilated all kinds of philosophies, styles, histories, writings, and they throw out what they have gleaned from that.

  • Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I've seen on some of the songs that I've written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

  • Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.

  • It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.

  • I re-invented my image so many times that I'm in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman.

  • I don't make changes to confuse anyone. I'm just searching. That's what causes me to change. I'm just searching for myself.

  • I went through all the musicians in my life who I admire as bright, intelligent, virtuosic players.

  • I've always been very chauvinistic, even in my boy-obsessed days. But I was always a gentleman. I alwaysd treated my boys like real ladies. Always escorted them properly and, in fact, I suppose if I were a lot older - like 40 or 50 - I'd be a wonderful sugar daddy to some little queen down in Kensington. I'd have a houseboy named Richard to order around.

  • I really believe that Bob Dylan and others have speeded up the changes. Pacifism has found a voice at last.

  • I'm a phallus in pigtails, and there's blood on my nose, and my tissue is rotting where the rats chew my bones. And my eye sockets empty, see nothing but pain, I keep having this brainstorm about twelve times a day.

  • Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

  • I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.

  • I hate albums that are really happy. When I am really happy, I don't like to hear happy albums, and when I am really sad I don't wanna hear happy albums... and I tend to gravitate towards the lonely and isolated anyway when I write.

  • Put on your red shoes, and dance the blues.

  • All the great mystical religions put a strong emphasis on the redeeming qualities of sex.

  • Lou Reed is the most important definitive writer in modern rock. Not because of the stuff that he does, but the direction that he will take it.

  • You would think that a rock star being married to a super-model would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.

  • ... And these childrenthat you spit onas they try to change their worldsare immune to your consultations.They're quite awareof what they're going through...

  • I'm an instant star, just add water.

  • Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming

  • I believe that I often bring out the best in somebody's talents.

  • Strangely, some songs you really don't want to write.

  • People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture they were brought up in. People have attention spans of five seconds and as much depth as a glass of water.

  • I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlourdrinking milk shakes cold and longSmiling and waving and looking so finedon't think you knew you were in this song

  • They're the salt of the earth, those girls. They don't sit each night and compare notes on groups, criticising lyrics, asking if it's valid. They just play the record... yeah, and maybe they dance. I love them. I love them dearly

  • And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I'm going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I'm going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

  • There's a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I'm affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn't want to leave. He likes it very much.

  • Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you're pretty much on the way out...

  • Is it Nice in your snowstorm- freezing your brain? Do you think that your face looks the same?

  • I think everything that I learned about stagecraft and carrying through - creating a through point for a theatrical device.

  • Mine is really - Ziggy Stardust, characters, "Let's Dance." That's me in the American.

  • I surrounded myself with people who indulged my ego. They treated me as though I was Ziggy Stardust or one of my characters, never realising that David Jones might be behind it.

  • Always drawn to the theatric, Bowie also performed in stage productions of "The Elephant Man" and just recently collaborated on "Lazarus," an off-Broadway musical that's a sequel to his 1976 role in the film "The Man Who Fell To Earth."

  • It's much easier for me to say that, the kind of music I didn't listen to was pretty much that. I mean everything, from jazz to classical to popular. And Tibetan horns were a great part of it in 1966, '67.

  • I was studying Tibetan Buddhism when I was quite young, again influenced by Kerouac.

  • The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.

  • It always felt like you were trying too hard to look like the audience or something. That whole thing about the artistic integrity, which, of course, I've never bought into - with any artist. It's just not a real thing.

  • I was always accused of being cold and unfeeling. It was because I was intimidated about touching people.

  • I find it easier to write in these little vignettes; if I try to get any more heavy, I find myself out of my league.

  • And I think my spaceship knows which way to go.

  • For here, am I sitting in a tin can, far above the world. Planet Earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do... Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles, I'm feeling very still - and I think my spaceship knows which way to go. Tell my wife I love her very much.

  • Why bother choosing a certain chair? Because that chair says something about you.

  • I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.

  • Hear this Robert Zimmerman, I wrote a song for you, about a strange young man called Dylan with a voice like sand and glue.

  • I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

  • As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I've got left?

  • I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

  • Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

  • I'm well past the age where I'm acceptable. You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth.

  • I'm an instant star. Just add water and stir.

  • When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

  • I've made over 25 studio albums, and I think probably I've made two real stinkers in my time, and some not-bad albums, and some really good albums. I'm proud of what I've done. In fact it's been a good ride.

  • However, there's no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.

  • Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It's because I'm not quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on: 'Well, I'm almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.'

  • I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.

  • I'm just an individual who doesn't feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I'm working for me.

  • I realized the other day that I've lived in New York longer than I've lived anywhere else. It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange; I never thought I would be.

  • I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

  • I'm not very articulate.

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

  • That's the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God - so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true... Hell, don't pose me that one.

  • Since the departure of good old-fashioned entertainers the re-emergence of somebody who wants to be an entertainer has unfortunately become a synonym for camp. I don't think I'm camper than any other person who felt at home on stage, and felt more at home on stage than he did offstage.

  • When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

  • But I've got to think of myself as the luckiest guy. Robert Johnson only had one album's worth of work as his legacy. That's all that life allowed him.

  • I don't profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.

  • To not be modest about it, you'll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I've worked with have done their best work by far with me.

  • I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

  • Funk, I don't think I have anything to do with funk. I've never considered myself funky.

  • Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.

  • I think I am a lot more relaxed about what I have or haven't done.

  • I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we've made of them...The fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey.

  • If I never wake again, I certainly will have lived while I was alive.

  • On "Tonight" I think I was torn dreadfully between writing what I wanted to write, but keeping it in a style that would follow up what I had just done. That's where I feel I was untrue to myself as an artist . . . that album and, to a lesser extent, "Never Let Me Down."

  • One day I realized that I really needed to stop losing myself in my work and in my addictions. What happens is you just wake up one morning and feel absolutely dead. You can't even drag your soul back into your body. You feel you have negated everything that is wonderful about life. When you have fallen that far, it feels like a miracle when you regain your love of life. That's when you can begin really looking for a relationship. When you can appreciate the whole concept of giving to someone, not just taking.

  • The Internet is merely a new means of communication, that's all it is. It serves the purpose of getting information, which it is fantastic at. I mean, I live by the Internet in terms of research and it's incredible - there's nothing that you can't find out about. It's not stopped me going to bookshops but I must say that I don't go into as many because any book I want...

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