Top 100 David Bowie Quotes
#1. Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.
David Bowie
#2. The skin of my character in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' was some concoction, a spermatozoon of an alien nature that was obscene and weird-looking.
David Bowie
#3. You should turn around at the end of the day and say I really like that piece of work, or that piece of work sucked. Not, was that popular or wasn't it popular?
David Bowie
#4. I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.
David Bowie
#5. Put on your red shoes, and dance the blues.
David Bowie
#6. 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.
David Bowie
#7. If I wasn't going through a thing where I was also being my characters offstage, uh, I'm much happier just wearing the most low-profile things that I can come up with just so I can get down the street ...
David Bowie
#8. In order to look special wearing the chancy unique; it must be worn with your persona, and if the two don't blend, then the look becomes pear-shaped.
David Bowie
#9. I'm not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.
David Bowie
#10. 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.
David Bowie
#11. Let the children use it, let the children lose it, let all the children boogie.
David Bowie
#12. Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity.
David Bowie
#13. 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.
David Bowie
#14. 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.
David Bowie
#15. Bully for you, chilly for me, got to get a raincheck on pain.
David Bowie
#16. 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.
David Bowie
#17. 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.
David Bowie
#18. 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.
David Bowie
#19. Since early middle ages when people generally taking away the barbarity of their like, were pretty content. Although it was all an illicit contentment, what with the slave systems all over the world, in England especially, the peasants and the master, etc. People were incredibly content.
David Bowie
#20. The world that I inhabit in reality is probably very different world than the one people expect that I would be in. It is quite sedate. It's far removed from a lot of what they would feel to be the limousine traveling rock existence, or whatever.
David Bowie
#21. I am a moderately good singer. I am not a great singer but I can interpret a song, which I don't think is quite the same as singing it.
David Bowie
#22. 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.
David Bowie
#23. I'm not a natural performer. I don't like performing very much.
David Bowie
#24. Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly.
David Bowie
#25. I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.
David Bowie
#26. To be taken seriously about doing something creative and probably travel a lot. That was my motivation. I knew I was good, I knew I could write. I also knew you could get laid really easily.
David Bowie
#27. Age doesn't bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It's the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.
David Bowie
#28. 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.
David Bowie
#29. I guess it's flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.
David Bowie
#30. 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
David Bowie
#32. We could steal time, just for one day
We can be Heroes, for ever and ever
What d'you say?
David Bowie
#33. I don't know how many times someone has come up to me and said, "Hey, Lets dance!". I hate dancing. God, it's stupid.
David Bowie
#34. 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.
David Bowie
#35. 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.
David Bowie
#36. Listen to me, don't listen to me. Talk to me, don't talk to me.
David Bowie
#38. People don't get a chance to think, "Why am I a consumer?" Because the decisions come at them so fast and furiously, they're not [even] given time to think, I am a consumer.
David Bowie
#39. Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It's become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.
David Bowie
#40. I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I've done for 25 years. I don't need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.
David Bowie
#41. Fame, what you like is in the Limo. Fame, what you get is no tomorrow.
David Bowie
#42. I never really got the book together for the thing, so I had all the songs and the characters. But by the time we'd gotten it on the road and I'd been doing it for 18 months, oh God, I couldn't wait to move on to something else.
David Bowie
#43. 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
#44. If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.
David Bowie
#45. 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.
David Bowie
#46. Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.
David Bowie
#47. Being shoved into the top-40 scene was an unusual experience. It was great I'd become accessible to a huge audience but not terribly fulfilling.
David Bowie
#48. Gentleness clears the soul
Love cleans the mind
And makes it Free.
David Bowie
#49. 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.
David Bowie
#50. 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.
David Bowie
#51. Speak in extremes, it'll save you time.
David Bowie
#52. There's a starman waiting in the sky, he'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds.
David Bowie
#53. I guess Ziggy would have been the perfect vehicle to have done with.
David Bowie
#54. Elvis was a major hero of mine. I was probably stupid enough to believe that having the same birthday as him actually meant something.
David Bowie
#55. When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.
David Bowie
#56. I couldn't have written things like 'Low' and 'Heroes,' those particular albums, if it hadn't have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.
David Bowie
#57. I think music should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium.
David Bowie
#58. All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author, There is no authoritative active voice. There are only multiple readings.
David Bowie
#59. The only time that I've adopted characterization again since that point, for my own albums, has been an album called "Outside" that I did with Brian Eno .
David Bowie
#60. This ain't rock 'n' roll; this is genocide
David Bowie
#61. The end comes when the infinites arrive.
David Bowie
#62. I would like to believe that people knew what they were fighting for and why they wanted a revolution, and exactly what it was within that they didn't like.
David Bowie
#63. And you, You can be mean And I, I'll drink all the time 'Cause we're lovers, And that is a fact Yes we're lovers, And that is that
David Bowie
#64. The younger people get into the lyrics in a different way; there's much more of a tactile understanding, which is the way I prefer it.
David Bowie
#65. I think hip-hop is actually one of the most challenging things that's happened in music in a long time.
David Bowie
#66. In your fear, seek only peace. In your fear, seek only love.
David Bowie
#67. I've always tended to write songs prolifically.
David Bowie
#68. I wanted to rewrite how rock music was perceived.
David Bowie
#69. Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.
David Bowie
#70. Everywhere I looked, demons of the future [were] on the battlegrounds of one's emotional plane.
David Bowie
#71. Every time I've made a radical change it's helped me feel buoyant as an artist
David Bowie
#72. When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn't live past 30.
David Bowie
#73. 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.
David Bowie
#75. Pop stars are capable of growing old. Mick Jagger at 50 will be marvelous - a battered old roue - I can just see him. An aging rock star doesn't have to opt out life. When I'm 50, I'll prove it ...
David Bowie
#76. 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.
David Bowie
#77. 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.
David Bowie
#78. 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.
David Bowie
#79. Some of us, I think, us small, pompous arty ones probably read too much George Steiner and kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we'd better do something postmodernist - quickly, before somebody else did.
David Bowie
#80. Fame itself ... doesn't really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.
David Bowie
#81. I'm really quite bipolar, and the depressed times, when everything felt like night, sometimes you get to such a low point that you physically beat at it until it bleeds - as you would say - bleeds till sunshine.
David Bowie
#82. Frankly, if I could get away with not having to perform, I'd be very happy. It's not my favorite thing to do.
David Bowie
#83. I thought that I could do some kind of vehicle involving rock musicals and presenting rock and characters and storyline in a completely different fashion.
David Bowie
#84. I don't have a problem with ageing - in fact, I embrace that aspect of it. And am able to and obviously am going to be able to quite easily ... it doesn't faze me at all.
David Bowie
#85. My father worked for a children's home called Dr. Barnardo's Homes. They're a charity.
David Bowie
#86. I'm rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it's no longer his ... I just see what people make of it.
David Bowie
#87. When I looked in her eyes they were blue but nobody home.
David Bowie
#88. 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.
David Bowie
#89. Make the best of every moment. We're not evolving. We're not going anywhere.
David Bowie
#90. I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.
David Bowie
#91. 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.
David Bowie
#92. I'll paint you moments of gold, I'll spin you Valentine evenings ...
David Bowie
#93. The public, obviously, they takes things in a very simplest fashion and so they should. That's why we have such wonderful television.
David Bowie
#94. I think much has been made of this alter ego business. I mean, I actually stopped creating characters in 1975 - for albums, anyway.
David Bowie
#95. Is it Nice in your snowstorm- freezing your brain? Do you think that your face looks the same?
David Bowie
#96. She asked for my love and I gave her a dangerous mind.
David Bowie
#97. I'm wary of the word glam because I think that became the all-inclusive term with for any bloke with lipstick on, which is fine, you know, and that's what it is when it comes down to the public level.
David Bowie
#98. I've learned to relax and be my present age and my present position. I feel comfortable on my mid-thirties. It doesn't seem such an alien place to be.
David Bowie
#99. 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.
David Bowie
#100. The only real failure is trying to second-guess the taste of an audience. Nothing comes out of that except a kind of inward humiliation.
David Bowie
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