David Bowie Quotes

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.

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

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

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.

If I put faith in medication, if I can smile a crooked smile, if I can talk on television, if I can walk an empty mile.

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

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

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.

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.

The moment you know you know you know.

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.

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 heard the news today, oh boy.

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

Secret thinker sometimes listening aloud.

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.

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'.

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.

You know, I don't feel fifty. I feel not a day over forty-nine. It's incredible. I'm bouncy, I feel bouncy.

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.

I think I quite desperately wanted to have that kind of special companionship [like marriage ] . . . a special relationship, yet I hid from it for many, many years and pretended to be cynical about it.

I would like to believe that people knew what they were fighting for and why they wanted a revolution, and exactly what it was within that they didn't like.

I think getting married and then running away for 10 months would be an absolute disaster.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

If you want it, boys, get it here, thing.

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

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

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!

I met my wife because we were both going out with the same guy.

I never really had much of an interest in fashion.

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 can ask for cigarettes in every language

I'm a born librarian with a sex drive.

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.

I've always been very chauvinistic, even in my boy-obsessed days. But I was always a gentleman. I alwaysd treated my boys like real ladies. Always escorted them properly and, in fact, I suppose if I were a lot older - like 40 or 50 - I'd be a wonderful sugar daddy to some little queen down in Kensington. I'd have a houseboy named Richard to order around.

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.

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

There's a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I'm affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn't want to leave. He likes it very much.

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.

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

Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly.

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.