Top 93 Bowie On Bowie Quotes
#1. Nearly all the synth work on Heathen is mine and some of the piano.
David Bowie
#2. I had joined Yes in 1971. I was a classically trained musician who had worked with numerous artists as a session musician. I played on David Bowie's 'Life On Mars,' Cat Stevens's 'Morning Has Broken' and even on some Des O'Connor records, though I kept that quiet.
Rick Wakeman
#3. 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.
David Bowie
David Bowie
#4. 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.
David Bowie
#5. I was a huge Bowie fan since I was 12 years old. That was the first 'punk' rock I got into in the Seventies. I didn't find out about a lot of the other stuff that was going on, like New York Dolls and Roxy Music, until a lot later.
Buzz Osborne
#6. 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.
David Bowie
#7. But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart.
Bram Stoker
#8. Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation ... about where you fit in society.
David Bowie
#9. David Bowie's music is a moving target. Just when you think you got the bullseye, it shifts. And to his credit, on to death, it's still shifting. David Bowie is a moving target, even after he's gone.
Carlos Alomar
#10. [David] Bowie went on to make best-selling music - funk, dance music, electronic music, while also being influenced by cabaret and jazz.
David Bowie
#11. If I can get that DAM trio back together again - "get the band back together" - and put on a concert of David Bowie's electronic music, that's the way I want to remember David, moving forward into the future of music.
Carlos Alomar
#12. When I was about 13, 14 - 13, I would carry a magic marker with me everywhere I went so I could write the word "Bowie" on everything that wasn't mine.
RuPaul
#13. I would dream. I focused all my attention on going to America. The subculture, James Dean, the rock n' roll, the beat writers.
David Bowie
#14. When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.
David Bowie
#15. We expect the listener to have, like, a movie going on when they hear us. That's what it's all about for us.
Lester Bowie
#16. 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."
David Bowie
#17. I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it's so essential that when I'm involved in the actual process, my so-called 'real life' becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.
David Bowie
#18. 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
#19. I kind of miss that "becoming" stage, as most times you really don't know what's around the corner. Now, of course, I've kind of knocked on the door and heard a muffled answer. Nevertheless, I still don't know what the voice is saying, or even what language it's in.
David Bowie
#20. I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.
David Bowie
#21. 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!
David Bowie
#22. Because I believe that the future of the music lies in the Internet. It can be sold on the Internet.
Lester Bowie
#23. 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
#24. I once asked [John] Lennon what he thought of what I do. He said 'it's great, but its just rock and roll with lipstick on'.
David Bowie
#25. 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.
David Bowie
#26. What I've been trying to do for years is to get the music played on a station other than jazz stations, you know, to expand the audience.
Lester Bowie
#27. Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you're pretty much on the way out ...
David Bowie
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. The minute you know you're on safe ground, you're dead
David Bowie
#31. We slit the Catholic throat, stoned the poor on such slogans as wish you could hear and love is all we need.
David Bowie
#32. You can establish a presence on the internet; you can have just as much of a presence as a major company or anyone else.
Lester Bowie
#33. In my creative life, David Bowie is definitely an enormous influence on me, being one of rock's greatest shapeshifters.
Scott Weiland
#34. 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.
David Bowie
#35. And these children
that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your consultations.
They're quite aware
of what they're going through ...
David Bowie
#36. 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.
David Bowie
#37. Trying to tart the rock business up a bit is getting nearer to what the kids themselves are like, because what I find, if you want to talk in the terms of rock, a lot depends on sensationalism and the kids are a lot more sensational than the stars themselves.
David Bowie
#38. 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
David Bowie
#39. He always gets the birthday shit, and nobody even knows I got born. Jimmy Page was born on the ninth, you can make something out of that. But the eighth?
David Bowie
#40. She couldn't wait to curl up on her couch and eat dinner while watching an episode of Grimm. Bowie
Tabitha Conall
#41. Having not really written any generational songs - I think maybe two or three of the songs that I've ever written have any bearing on the age of the listener. My stuff tends to be far more concerned with the spiritual and with subjects like isolation and being miserable.
David Bowie
#42. I'm not a prophet or a stone aged man / just a mortal with potential of a superman / I'm living on.
David Bowie
#43. 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
#44. 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.
David Bowie
#45. 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
#46. 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.
David Bowie
#47. Everywhere I looked, demons of the future [were] on the battlegrounds of one's emotional plane.
David Bowie
#48. Bully for you, chilly for me, got to get a raincheck on pain.
David Bowie
#49. 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
#50. I'm a person who can take on the guises of people I meet. I'm a collector, and I collect personalities and ideas.
David Bowie
#51. Early on, I was into David Bowie. Then someone in the band suggested I try a Bryan Ferry type of thing. That's when I started wearing three-piece suits. It wasn't unnatural for me.
Robin Zander
#52. People got extremely comfortable with being able to turn on their television and see MTV say, "This guy's hot you should buy this record."
David Bowie
#53. Somebody like Bowie was so interesting because when you got him off stage, he was like a businessman. But on stage, he was just dazzling. It was like watching butterflies grow.
D. A. Pennebaker
#54. Strung out on lasers and slash back blazers.
David Bowie
#55. 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.
David Bowie
#57. There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I'm surprised aren't being used on MTV.
David Bowie
#58. How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.'
Ali Smith
#59. 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
#60. You can't stand still on one point for your entire life.
David Bowie
#61. Some people are marching together and some on their own. Others are running, the smaller ones crawl. But some sit in silence.
David Bowie
#62. People will keep the TV on even if a show is on that they hate - because, unfortunately, they've been programmed to do that.
David Bowie
#63. You would think that anyone on a major label would be doing something, but when you speak of major label that means something to maybe a big pop star that might be getting some sort of benefit from the major. But we still don't get anything.
Lester Bowie
#64. Rather than really have, like a close relationship to anything that's coming out today, people are just, they've got it on as background music. It's kind of the same way the cabdrivers use music; it's very disposable.
David Bowie
#65. I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement - it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.
David Bowie
#66. All the great mystical religions put a strong emphasis on the redeeming qualities of sex.
David Bowie
#67. No problem. Just drop it back off before you go," he says, procuring a brass key. "And if he puts on Bowie's early stuff and starts sweet-talking, dammit, you run. You run as fast as you can.
Hannah Harrington
#68. Put on your red shoes, and dance the blues.
David Bowie
#69. The title song of David Bowie's 'Young Americans' is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.
Jon Landau
#70. We can't stop trying til we break up our minds, til the sun drips blood on the seedy young knight.
David Bowie
#71. I told [reporters] that I sprinkled marijuana on my organic buckwheat pancakes, and then when I ran my five miles to the ballpark, it made me impervious to the bus fumes. That's when [Baseball Commissioner] Bowie Kuhn took me off his Christmas list.
Bill Lee
#72. I knew that I was 'interesting' at 18 because I was aware that I could get away with doing things on stage.
David Bowie
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Being a hybrid maker off and on over the years, I'm very comfortable with the idea and have been the subject of quite a few pretty good mash-ups myself.
David Bowie
#76. For me, often, there's such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I'm going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don't know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.
David Bowie
#77. 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.'
David Bowie
#78. My joke is a picture of David Bowie on his balcony in the '70s in a suit in Paris, and unless that's you, I'm not interested. There are very few aesthetic types that I have, and people who look like that are not always necessarily good for me.
Jen Kirkman
#79. All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.
David Bowie
#80. 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
#81. Jeff [Koons] called me because he'd seen a portrait of David Bowie, at the beginning of the 80s - I've known Jeff for a long time - and he said, Greg, I want to look like a high-profile celebrity, living on the edge. I think that says it all.
Greg Gorman
#82. As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn't really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn't have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.
David Bowie
#83. I'm very curious about David Bowie's new record [2016]. I'm very, very ... I'm just incredibly curious, I want to see what's happening with that. I don't really know who else is putting out records, we've had our heads buried working on ours. I haven't really been paying much attention lately.
Patrick Stump
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. I don't know any Beatles songs. My dad never listened to Elvis or Sting or Bowie. Any band name that's on a t-shirt, I probably won't know their music, like AC/DC or whatever. I don't know what that is. As a kid, I would sing along to artists like Tania Maria.
FKA Twigs
#88. I feel confident imposing change on myself. It's a lot more fun progressing than looking back. That's why I need to throw curve balls.
David Bowie
#89. And it's always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn't want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you're dead as an artist.
David Bowie
#90. Absolutely. I understand that Miss Piggy is willing to serve as Queen of Scotland if there is a split. So you may want to guard your castles.
Kermit the frog's response to the question on if he agreed with David Bowie on whether Scotland should remain as part of Britain
Kermit The Frog
#91. You can't go on stage and live - it's false all the way. I can't stand the premise of going out in jeans and a guitar and looking as real as you can in front of 18,000 people. I mean, it's not normal!
David Bowie
#92. 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.
David Bowie
#93. I still derive immense pleasure from remembering how many hod-carrying brickies were encouraged to put on lurex tights and mince up and down the high street, having been assured by know-it-alls like me that a smidgen of blusher really attracted the birds.
David Bowie
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
