219 Inspiring Quotes by David Bowie

I'm not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with potential of a superman. I'm living on.

To not be modest about it, you'll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I've worked with have done their best work by far with me.

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.

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.

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?

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 never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.

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 went through all the musicians in my life who I admire as bright, intelligent, virtuosic players.

When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

I re-invented my image so many times that I'm in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman.

I don't profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.

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.

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 change my mind a lot. I usually don't agree with what I say very much. I'm an awful liar.

I guess it's flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

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.

You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

I've started doing book reviews for Barnes and 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.

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 humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

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've never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.

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.

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.

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.

I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn't live past 30.

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.

I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.

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.

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.

I could imagine at a certain age, when I have no vocal cords left, that I would find a young man who could sing my parts for me. But I don't see why I would stop.

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.

What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.

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.

But I'm pretty good with collaborative thinking. I work well with other people.

Nearly all the synth work on Heathen is mine and some of the piano.

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he's up there with Bryan Ferry.

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 guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I'm a writer... I write.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

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.

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.

I don't have stylistic loyalty. That's why people perceive me changing all the time. But there is a real continuity in my subject matter. As an artist of artifice, I do believe I have more integrity than any one of my contemporaries.

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.

Once I've written something it does tend to run away from me. I don't seem to have any part of it -- it's no longer my piece of writing.

I was never particularly fond of my voice.

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt -- you know, I had to go out and do them.

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.

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.

Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity.

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.

Frankly, if I could get away with not having to perform, I'd be very happy. It's not my favorite thing to do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

GYBE are among my, erm, two favourite Montreal bands, Arcade Fire being the other.

The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It's either 'rawk' or it's not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It's always been my way of expressing what for me is inexpressible by any other means.

If you feel safe in the area you're working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting.

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.

Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.

Don't you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

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.

The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic.

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.

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.

The moment you know you know you know.

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!

Look out my window, what do I see?
A crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me.
All the nightmares came today
And it looks as though they're here to stay.

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.

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

Turn and face the strange.

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.

Speak in extremes, it'll save you time.

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

I'm afraid of Americans.

Wham, bam, thank you Ma'am.

For here, I'm sitting in a tin can, far above the world. Planet earth is blue, and there is nothing I can do.

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

And I think my spaceship knows which way to go.

Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold.

Trust nothing but your own experience.

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.

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.

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

Don't let me hear you say life takes you nowhere, angel.

You can't stand still on one point for your entire life.

Making love with his ego.

Fame puts you there where things are hollow.

I had enormous self-image problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing. It's exactly what I do now, except I enjoy it now. I'm not driven like I was in my twenties. I was driven to get through life very quickly.

Church on time, makes me party.

I surrounded myself with people who indulged my ego. They treated me as though I was Ziggy Stardust or one of my characters, never realising that David Jones might be behind it.

My father worked for a children's home called Dr. Barnardo's Homes. They're a charity.

Rebel, rebel, you've torn your dress. Rebel, rebel, your face is a mess. Rebel, rebel, how could they know? Hot tramp, I love you so.

It took me a long time to reach the bottom and it went through various stages. I went from drugs into an alcohol stage. For a while, one feels, "Ah, I've kicked drugs," but what I discovered was I had another addiction instead.

Oooh, fashion, we are the goon squad and were coming to town, beep beep.

There's a starman waiting in the sky, he'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds.

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.

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.

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.

It's only forever... Not long at all.

It's a compulsive need to wreck everything. You might notice there's a pattern of stripping down and building back up again throughout my life. But I guess that's how some of us conduct our lives.

I don't like talk and I don't like talkers. Like Ma Barker. That's what she always said, 'Ma Barker doesn't like talk and she doesn't like talkers.' She just sat there with her gun.

I'm a thinker not a talker.

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.

Mine is really -- Ziggy Stardust, characters, "Let's Dance." That's me in the American.

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.

Rock's always been the devil's music.

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 have found myself deeply, deeply intrigued by the ska-punk scene. It's such an expressive form of popular music, it's so real, it's got so much life: it's the most vital music in the world.

I'm responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.

Sits like a man, but smiles like a reptile.

In your fear, seek only peace. In your fear, seek only love.

There were lots of nightly relationships. But the reason you don't want to make a commitment is not that you're such a freewheeling, adventurous person, it's because you're scared shitless that it will turn out like your mother and father.

In my madness I see your face in mine.

I think that we have created a new kind of person in a way. We have created a child who will be so exposed to the media that he will be lost to his parents by the time he is 12.

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.

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

I think the first song I ever wrote ... was called "Can't Help Thinking About Me." That's an illuminating little piece, isn't it?

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.

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.

Hear this Robert Zimmerman, I wrote a song for you, about a strange young man called Dylan with a voice like sand and glue.

I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.

Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you're pretty much on the way out.

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.

We slit the Catholic throat, stoned the poor on such slogans as wish you could hear and love is all we need.

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 was always accused of being cold and unfeeling. It was because I was intimidated about touching people.

I find it easier to write in these little vignettes; if I try to get any more heavy, I find myself out of my league.

I'm regarded quite asexually by a lot of people. And the people that understand me the best are nearer to what I understand about me.

I was studying Tibetan Buddhism when I was quite young, again influenced by Kerouac.

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.

People are always throwing things at me that I've said and I say that I didn't mean anything.

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.

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?