David Bowie Thinking Quotations

I've never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.

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

Funk, I don't think I have anything to do with funk. I've never considered myself funky.

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!

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

I've made over 25 studio albums, and I think probably I've made two real stinkers in my time, and some not-bad albums, and some really good albums. I'm proud of what I've done. In fact it's been a good ride.

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.

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.

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.

I think much has been made of this alter ego business. I mean, I actually stopped creating characters in 1975 - for albums, anyway.

I liked rock music, I kind of moved into that sphere, somehow thinking that somewhere along the line I'd be able to put the two together. And I suppose I very nearly did with the Ziggy character.

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 think fame itself is not a rewarding thing. The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants.

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

I think the only music I didn't listen to was country and western, and that holds to this day.

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 I think my spaceship knows which way to go.

I guess a certain contingent of the musicians in London at the beginning of the '70s were fed up with denim and the hippies. And I think we kind of wanted to go somewhere else.

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?

I have to take total control myself. I can't let anybody else do anything, for I find that I can do things better for me. I don't want to get other people playing with what they think that I'm trying to do.

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

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.

Love is every type of relationship that you think of... I'm sure it means relationship, every type of relationship that you can think of.

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

Is it Nice in your snowstorm- freezing your brain? Do you think that your face looks the same?

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.

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.

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.

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.

If I hadn't had my children, I would have been discouraged a lot quicker. It would have been much more easy for me to say, "You know what, let the whole thing go. Have a good time, because these people, this place - it's just not worth it." You know? I can't do that anymore. I look into those eyes and they look at me so trustingly that I'm gonna make sure that [they're thinking], "Hey, you did a good thing bringing me into the world, daddy. I'm going to have a great life!"

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 never heard so many kids talk about just doing anything to be famous. I mean, yeah, fame is part of the deal when you're a kid and you think, I wanna go into music, but everybody that I knew was really doing it because of their love for it. I don't see so much of that anymore.

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.

I think that the history of rock could be recycled in a different way and brought back into focus without the luggage that comes along with it.

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.

I think that my fascination with clothes generally was motivated by trying to create the characters for the stage.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A lot of people that I know are bugged with the idea that they have got to have an audience, or they have got to be liked. I think the more that you fall into that trap it makes your own life harder to come to terms with, because an audience appreciation is only going to be periodic at the best of times.