David Bowie Quotes

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I'm a writer ... I write.

Critics I don't understand. They get too intellectual. They're not very well-versed in street talk; it takes them longer to say it. So they have to do it in dictionaries and they take longer to say it.

I can ask for cigarettes in every language

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.

I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there.

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

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn't live past 30.

Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.

Would you carry a razor, in case, just in case of depression?

I'm very good at what I do, and I don't turn my hand to something unless I'm very good at it, frankly.

Sweet head, give you sweet head.

I'll place my love beneath the stars.

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.

There's a thing that just as you go to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated that you will never go below the dream stage. And I've used that quite a lot and it keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed.

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 best DJs in the world know how to pull in music from all over the place and make it work as a cohesive whole.

These are all personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's as simple as that.

David Bowie emerged as a rock star in the late '60s. And as Ken Tucker wrote, "In the face of the hippy era's sincerity, intimacy and generosity, Bowie presented irony, distance and self-absorption. His song 'Changes' announced the arrival of a new counterculture," unquote.

I think Mustique is Duchampian - it will always provide an endless source of delight.

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.

You can neither win nor lose if you don't run the race

I have all the admiration in the world for somebody like Bono, who really puts himself on the line and tries actively to do something about our world situation.

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

No more free steps to heaven.

- It's No Game

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

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.

In my madness I see your face in mine.

This is a mad planet," David Bowie said in 1971. "It's doomed to madness.

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."

And the stars look very different today.

Someday, I'm gonna write a poem in a letter; Someday, I'm gonna get that faculty together.

What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.

Look up here, I'm in heaven!
I've got scars that can't be seen
I've got drama, can't be stolen,
Everybody knows me now
( ... )
This way or no way
You know I'll be free
Just like that bluebird
Now, ain't that just like me?

My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home - I think in those days we called them arguments - about who was right and who was wrong.

I've never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.

Keep your 'lectric eye on me babe
Put your ray gun to my head
Press your space face close to mine, love
Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah!

I don't like talk and I don't like talkers. Like Ma Barker. That's what she always said, 'Ma Barker doesn't like talk and she doesn't like talkers.' She just sat there with her gun.

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 a person who can take on the guises of people I meet. I'm a collector, and I collect personalities and ideas.

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

I think it's rather a waste of time endlessly singing the same songs every night for a year, and it's just not what I want to do.

Make the best of every moment. We're not evolving. We're not going anywhere.

Turn and face the strange changes.

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.

I think hip-hop is actually one of the most challenging things that's happened in music in a long time.

I ask for so little.Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave

My particular thing is discovering what can be done with media and how it can be used. You can't draw people together like one big huge family, people don't want that. They want isolation or a tribal thing.

The only art I'll ever study is stuff I can steal from.

If I hadn't had my children, I would have been discouraged a lot quicker. It would have been much more easy for me to say, "You know what, let the whole thing go. Have a good time, because these people, this place - it's just not worth it." You know? I can't do that anymore. I look into those eyes and they look at me so trustingly that I'm gonna make sure that [they're thinking], "Hey, you did a good thing bringing me into the world, daddy. I'm going to have a great life!"

You can't put down anybody. You can just try and understand. The emphasis shouldn't be on revolution, it should be on communication. Because it's just going to get more uptight. The more the revolution goes on, and there will be a civil war sooner or later.

People look to me to see what the spirit of the Seventies is.

I've been putting out the fire with gasoline.

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 don't crave applause. I'm not one of those guys who comes alive on stage. I'm much more alive at home, I think.

Gentleness clears the soul
Love cleans the mind
And makes it Free.

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.

Rock has always been THE DEVIL'S MUSIC ... I believe rock and roll is dangerous ... I feel we're only heralding SOMETHING EVEN DARKER THAN OURSELVES.

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.

[David] Bowie went on to make best-selling music - funk, dance music, electronic music, while also being influenced by cabaret and jazz.

Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.

My sexual nature is irrelevant. I'm an actor, I play roles, fragments of myself.

There are times when I prefer a cerebral moment with an artist, and I'll just enjoy the wit of a Picabia or a Duchamp. It amuses me that they thought that what they did would be a good way of making art.

TV has eaten up everything else, and Warhol films are all that are left, which is fabulous. Pork could become the next I Love Lucy, the great American domestic comedy. It's about how people really live, not like Lucy, who never touched dishwater. It's about people living and hustling to survive.

When I was 9 years old, I wanted to be the baritone sax player in the Little Richard band.

David Thomas: What do you think is the worst crime that could possibly be committed? What is the crime that offends you most?
David Bowie: Seeing a man humble himself in his capacity as a worker to somebody else, and having to have that accepted as a given situation.

Illusion I will be, for I've never been a sinner.

I don't see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

Feeling so gay, feeling so gay.

I'm quite certain that the audience that I've got for my stuff don't listen to the lyrics.

We can be "heroes" just for one day.

- "Heroes"

I should live my life on bended knee
If I can't control my destiny
You've gotta have a scheme
You've gotta have a plan
In the world of today, for tomorrow's man
No control

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.

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 think the first song I ever wrote ... was called "Can't Help Thinking About Me." That's an illuminating little piece, isn't it?

I think music should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium.

Everything I read about hitting a midlife crisis was true. I had such a struggle letting go of youthful things and learning how to exist and have enthusiasm while settling into the comfort of an older age.

If you want it, boys, get it here, thing.

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

Love me, say you do. Let me fly away with you, for my love is like the wind; and wild is the wind.

There's a taste in my mouth and it's no taste at all.

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.

I'll ruin everything you are, I'll give you television.

Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.

A lot of people provide me with quotes. They suggest all kinds of things to say and I do, really, because I'm not very hip at all.

I probably also wanted to be black at that particular time [ 9 years old] as well.

Rebel, rebel, you've torn your dress. Rebel, rebel, your face is a mess. Rebel, rebel, how could they know? Hot tramp, I love you so.

I really wanted to do, more than anything else, up until I was around 16, 17, was write musicals.

As you get older the questions come down to two or three. How long have I got and what am I gonna do with the time I've got left?

There have been times when I've written something and it goes out and it comes back in a letter from some kid as to what they think about it and I've taken their analysis to heart so much that I have taken up his thing. Writing what my audience is telling me to write.

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.

An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I'm from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.

There's just some dysfunctionalism with artists. There are good things and bad things about being an artist, and the good thing is, sometimes you get an inside line on what's really happening. You develop these strange antennae that clue you in to what's really going on.

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

Every time I've made a radical change it's helped me feel buoyant as an artist

The name Zahra was to have been lman's own name at birth, but a senior member of the family changed it to lman at the last minute.

Rock's always been the devil's music.

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.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

What I like doing is writing and recording and much more on the, I guess, the - on that creative level. It's fun interpreting songs and all that, but I wouldn't like it as a living.

People are always throwing things at me that I've said and I say that I didn't mean anything.