Top 479 Quotes & Sayings by David Bowie - Page 6

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.

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.

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.

When you are an artist you can turn your hand to anything, in any style. Once you have the tools then all the artforms are the same in the end.

You'd like to know me well, but I've got things inside my head that even I can't face.

The sun machine is coming down, and we're gonna have a party.

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

I had a fantasy that i'd drift up to Scotland and spend my life as a faux bodhisattua.

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

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.

Money goes to money heaven, body goes to body hell.

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

Ironically, style doesn't come even closely related to fashion. It's got nothing to do [with clothes].

There was a time in America not long ago when rock 'n' roll was called race music, and white kids who wanted to go see Chuck Berry were completely forbidden.

I just put drugs down to luck. I persevere quite honestly, and I've got a fair amount of discipline that keeps me out of deep water.

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.

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

I went mainstream in a major way with the song "Let's Dance." And what I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did "Let's Dance," and it was driving me mad - because it took all my passion for experimenting away.

I'm rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work it's no longer his.

Am I Machiavellian? I don't think I'm quite the mastermind people would have me be. Everything I do tends to be very successful and it may have something to do with the fact that I'm very good, not necessarily that I manipulate. But that doesn't often occur to people.

My work is really the accumulation of these different moods that I've had throughout my life and where they've taken me. I start looking back, and I think, I've actually created a life out of all this, out of these changes of mood. They've pushed me through all these years, and I seem to have a semblance of a life, and if I look very carefully, I can see some thematic design to it. There's some continuity.

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.

I believe in Beatles, I believe my little soul has grown.

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

I'm not actually a very keen performer. I like putting shows together. I like putting events together.

I was told that it was cool to fall in love, and that period was nothing like that to me. I gave too much of my time and energy to another person and they did the same to me and we started burning out against each other. And that is what is termed love.

If we could be heroes, if just for one day.

Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold. I will buy a chair for my house. What style of chair are you gonna buy? Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived. I mean, why bother choosing a chair because it looks a certain way? Because there's gonna be something about that chair that says something about you.

The public, obviously, they takes things in a very simplest fashion and so they should. That's why we have such wonderful television.

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.

There's something about the style of living in the country that they feel, "This is what represents me." So style is about the philosophy of how we create our civilization.

We were terribly excited, and I think we took it on our shoulders that we were creating the 21st century in 1971. That was the idea. And we wanted to just blast everything in the past, rather like the vorticists did at the beginning of the century in the Britain or the dadaists did Europe, you know. It was the same sensibility of everything is rubbish, and all rubbish is wonderful.

I don't mind trying it out and making sure something seems to work well.

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

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."

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

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.

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

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

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.

I went to a middle-class school, but my background is working class. I got the best of both worlds, I saw both classes, so I have a pretty fair idea of how people live and why they do it.

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!

You go through stages where you wonder whether you are Christ, or just looking for him.

Bully for you, chilly for me, got to get a raincheck on pain.

The people who don't know so much about me regard me more sexually.

Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.

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.

Actually, my ambition at eight or nine years old was to be one of Little Richard's sax players, and that's when I got my first saxophone, a Selmer. It was a strange Bakelite material - that creamy plastic with all the gold keys on it. I had to get a job as a butcher's delivery boy to start paying for it.

The coming together of people I find obscene as a principle. It is not human. It is not a natural thing as some people would have us believe.

I'm gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones.

I'm still younger than Jagger... Most people are.

Fame, what you like is in the Limo. Fame, what you get is no tomorrow.

I'm English. I can't accept happiness that easily. There's got to be a trick in there somewhere.

I'm a blackstar. I'm a blackstar.

I started playing around with local rock band swith the alto. And then, in a nutshell, somebody fell ill one night, the lead singer of one of the bands, and they knew I could sing, so they asked me if I would stand in. And I quite enjoyed it, actually, I must say, at 14. It was a real trip to have girls wave at you and smile and everything just because you opened your mouth and sang.

I guess, - a greater number of the 26 or so albums that I've made are known in Europe than they are in America.

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

I have absolutely no interest in rock and roll. I'm just being David Bowie. Mick Jagger is rock and roll. I mean, I go out and my music is roughly the format of rock and roll, I use the chord changes of rock and roll, but I don't feel I'm a rock and roll artist. I'd be a terrible rock artist, absolutely ghastly.