Top 479 Quotes & Sayings by David Bowie - Page 7

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."

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 think every time I said, "I'm working with Nile [Rodgers]," the reaction was, "Oh, great. I love 'Let's Dance.' " I think that's pretty expected. I'm not sure Nile and I went in consciously not to make "Let's Dance." We just wanted to work together again.

I turned myself to face me, but I've never caught a glimpse of how the others must see the faker.

It's not the side effects of the cocaine. . . . I'm thinking that it must be love.

I think the first experience scared the hell out of me. Within months of my initial marriage [on Angela Bowie], I realized I had done a really naive and rather stupid thing. . . . I don't think either of us had any real resolve about being together. The result was it made me wary of relationships.

I got a bad migraine that lasted 3 years, and the pills I took made by fingers disappear.

Church on time, makes me party.

Fame puts you there where things are hollow.

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.

It was like treading water all through the '60s, and when 1970 kicked in, I thought "We're here. Right." God, this is exciting. I'm going to go for it now. I really felt it was my time. Then Marc Bolan did it first. That really pissed me off.

I woke up one day and realized I was a closet hetero

Capitalism can be alright, I mean Karl Marx didn't live to see what Roosevelt did with that Depression. He pulled everybody out of that Depression and everybody hated Franklin Roosevelt. He got into office four times. One after the other, with everybody saying, he can't get in again. Everybody voted for Roosevelt four times and he did a hell of a lot.

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

At no point did I ever doubt I would be as near as anybody could be to England's Elvis Presley. Even from eight or nine years old, I thought, Well, I'll be the greatest rock star in England. I just made up my mind.

I guess, people like myself and Roxy Music that had a different agenda about taking up music.

1961 was when I was really into clothes. I left school at 15 and started copying a bloke who used to go up on the train to London with me; Leslie, I think his name was. He was like, top mod of his own area. He wore Italian jackets with white linen jeans. Boy, was that cool! I mean, that's in style now - it's very much the L.A. look. But he was wearing it then, and it looked supercool.

She's a total bam bam.

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

It's much easier for me to say that, the kind of music I didn't listen to was pretty much that. I mean everything, from jazz to classical to popular. And Tibetan horns were a great part of it in 1966, '67.

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.

I just tried everything out - I mean, everything. Even my sexual orientation; I was just searching for what I really wanted. And I didn't quite know.

I really floated around in the '60s, because I felt comfortable with nothing.

I have a very strong paternal streak. I'm a born father...I get such enjoyment out of being with children. Now they are enjoyable little things. They really are. I like their kind of humor. You can stuff all your punk bands, give me three children instead.

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.

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.

When the musical keyboard was created in the 1970's, you had electronic geeks that had no background in music created these devises and gave them to musicians that had no background in electronics. The result was some of the wierd sounds that came out in the '70s.

I'll paint you moments of gold, I'll spin you Valentine evenings.

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

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.

Wham, bam, thank you Ma'am.

Nature Boy There was a boy A very strange enchanted boy They say he wandered very far, very far Over land and sea A little shy And sad of eye But very wise Was he And then one day A magic day he passed my way And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings This he said to me “The greatest thing You’ll ever learn Is just to love And be loved In return

I don't think I did anything that my contemporaries didn't; it was just that I was the only one who talked about it. In the Sixties anyone who had a sense of style seemed to be gay. I wanted to indentify with that.

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

There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I'm surprised aren't being used on MTV.

My mother was a housewife. Both from - well, my father was from a farming family, agricultural family in the north of England. And my mother came from a very working class.

I'm not sure that an art career would have any benefit for me; I'm not sure it's what I want. I don't think I want to be a designer-rock artist.

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.

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.

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

Strung out on lasers and slash back blazers.

Visions of swastikas in my head, plans for everyone. It's in the Whites of my eyes.

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.

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!

It's almost a social grace to get into the art world, and I'm very wary of it. Art was good in Berlin in the late '70s - there was a lot more guts to art when the Neo-Expressionists were starting up; it was real slapdash; it has real heart to it - but it seems so cold and heartless in America. It's a buyer's market.

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.

Let the children use it, let the children lose it, let all the children boogie.

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.

[David] Bowie had a genius for continual change himself, reinventing his sound and his image throughout the decades. Each album seemed to find Bowie in a different persona, with a new sound to match his new look.

I'm afraid of Americans; I'm afraid of the world; I'm afraid I can't help it.

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.

I spent so much time in my bedroom. It really was my entire world. I had books up there, my music up there, my record player. Going from my world upstairs out onto the street, I had to pass through this no-man's-land of the living room, you know, and out the front hall.

The underground went really underground. Grand Funk, and all these people man are the moderate's choice of music. Underground is Yoko Ono, The Black Poets. These people scare the hell out of most freaks. They laugh at Yoko Ono, but it's the whole cliché.

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

I always write well in New York.

When we decided to marry, we had two ceremonies - one was more bureaucratic for the sake of the Swiss authorities,then a church service in Florence, and I wrote the music for the church service. The challenge in that was that Iman's [Abdulmajid] family are Muslim and mine are Protestant. I had to be careful about the prayers that we chose and the music I wrote because I didn't want to offend either side.

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.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, and Allan Ginsberg's period. Excuse me but that was where it was at. The hippies, I'm afraid, don't know what's happening.

I don't live for the stage. I don't live for an audience.

I'm afraid of Americans.