David Bowie Quotations | Page 2

Being shoved into the top-40 scene was an unusual experience. It was great I'd become accessible to a huge audience but not terribly fulfilling.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

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

I don't crave applause. I'm not one of those guys who comes alive on stage. I'm much more alive at home, I think.

I knew that I was 'interesting' at 18 because I was aware that I could get away with doing things on stage.

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

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 think Mustique is Duchampian - it will always provide an endless source of delight.

I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement - it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.

I would dream. I focused all my attention on going to America. The subculture, James Dean, the rock n' roll, the beat writers.

I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places.

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.

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

I'm wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It's a real enjoyment.

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange; I never thought I would be.

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

Now I realize that from '72 through to about '76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn't have been more rock star.

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

The name Zahra was to have been lman's own name at birth, but a senior member of the family changed it to lman at the last minute.

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

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle. The rock stars have assimilated all kinds of philosophies, styles, histories, writings, and they throw out what they have gleaned from that.

An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I'm from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I do value the respect I get from my contemporaries, but to have Oasis cover my song, to have Puff Daddy cover a song, to have Goldie come along to my gigs - that's where my ego is at. To have my fellow musicians like what I do, that's very cool.

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.

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.

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.

I think in the '70s that there was a general feeling of chaos, a feeling that the idea of the '60s as 'ideal' was a misnomer. Nothing seemed ideal anymore. Everything seemed in-between.

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 wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn't have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that - except I couldn't afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.

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.

I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

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

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.

Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at.

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.

There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Internet is merely a new means of communication, that's all it is. It serves the purpose of getting information, which it is fantastic at. I mean, I live by the Internet in terms of research and it's incredible - there's nothing that you can't find out about. It's not stopped me going to bookshops but I must say that I don't go into as many because any book I want...

I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we've made of them...The fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey.

If I never wake again, I certainly will have lived while I was alive.

One day I realized that I really needed to stop losing myself in my work and in my addictions. What happens is you just wake up one morning and feel absolutely dead. You can't even drag your soul back into your body. You feel you have negated everything that is wonderful about life. When you have fallen that far, it feels like a miracle when you regain your love of life. That's when you can begin really looking for a relationship. When you can appreciate the whole concept of giving to someone, not just taking.

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.

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

I'm a born librarian with a sex drive

... 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...

Put on your red shoes, and dance the blues.

The end comes when the infinites arrive.

Trust nothing but your own experience.

If you come from art, you'll always be art.

I'm not sure whether it is me changing my mind, or whether I lie a lot.

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

Comfort comes into your house first as guest, then as a host, then finally as the master.

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

I once asked [John] Lennon what he thought of what I do. He said 'it's great, but its just rock and roll with lipstick on'.

You can't put down anybody. You can just try and understand. The emphasis shouldn't be on revolution, it should be on communication. Because it's just going to get more uptight. The more the revolution goes on, and there will be a civil war sooner or later.

The only art I'll ever study is stuff I can steal from.

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

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

Rock has always been THE DEVIL'S MUSIC . . . I believe rock and roll is dangerous . . . I feel we're only heralding SOMETHING EVEN DARKER THAN OURSELVES.

Elvis was a major hero of mine. I was probably stupid enough to believe that having the same birthday as him actually meant something.

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.

The minute you know you're on safe ground, you're dead

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.

I can ask for cigarettes in every language

For me a chameleon is something that disguises itself to look as much like its environment as possible. I always thought I did exactly the opposite of that.

I want people to hear musicians like Joe Cuba. He has done things to whole masses of Puerto Rican people. The music is fantastic and important.

I couldn't stand to be separated with my wife for months. It became quickly apparent to me that I needed to find a balance between my absolute work obsession and a private life that we could share without my disappearing all the time.

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.

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

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.

It's odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about 'old and other times' as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory.

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?

We could steal time, just for one day We can be Heroes, for ever and ever What d'you say?

I hate albums that are really happy. When I am really happy, I don't like to hear happy albums, and when I am really sad I don't wanna hear happy albums... and I tend to gravitate towards the lonely and isolated anyway when I write.

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.

She asked for my love and I gave her a dangerous mind.

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?

Turn and face the strange.

You can neither win nor lose if you don't run the race

To be taken seriously about doing something creative and probably travel a lot. That was my motivation. I knew I was good, I knew I could write. I also knew you could get laid really easily.

There's just some dysfunctionalism with artists. There are good things and bad things about being an artist, and the good thing is, sometimes you get an inside line on what's really happening. You develop these strange antennae that clue you in to what's really going on.

The moment you know you know you know.

One day in Berlin ... Eno came running in and said, 'I have heard the sound of the future.' ... he puts on 'I Feel Love', by Donna Summer ... He said, 'This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.' Which was more or less right.

Some people are marching together and some on their own. Others are running, the smaller ones crawl. But some sit in silence.

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

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.