Top 479 Quotes & Sayings by David Bowie
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English musician David Bowie.
Last updated on October 10, 2024.
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.
I change my mind a lot. I usually don't agree with what I say very much. I'm an awful liar.
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!
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 re-invented my image so many times that I'm in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman.
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?
Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that - that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.
When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.
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.
The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic.
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'm not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with potential of a superman. I'm living on.
My son's full real name is Duncan Zowie Haywood. As a toddler, he was called by his second name Zowie. But it was such an identifiable name during the Seventies that if I called him loudly in public places, everyone would turn to stare, so I started calling him Joey to take the pressure off.
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.
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.
Art was, seriously, the only thing I'd ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.
Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.
Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity.
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.
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.
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.
Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.
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.
Fame itself... doesn't really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.
You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.
Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.
Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.
I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.
What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.
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.
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.
There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn't bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.
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 wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.
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.
I'm an early riser. I get up between five and six, have coffee, and read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up.
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.
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.
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.
My father worked for a children's home called Dr. Barnardo's Homes. They're a charity.
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.
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 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.
The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.
I'm an instant star. Just add water and stir.
All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.
When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn't live past 30.
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.
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.
Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.
I don't see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.
I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.
I don't like to read things that people write about me. I'd rather read what kids have to say about me because it's not their profession to do that.
I'm not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.
What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That's what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.
I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.
I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.
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.
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.
With a suit, always wear big British shoes, the ones with large welts. There's nothing worse than dainty little Italian jobs at the end of the leg line.
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