David bowie quotes

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

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.

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

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.

Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.

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

I'm very shy. That's probably one of the reasons I got so heavily into drugs.

Of course, we found out later Syd Barrett had mental problems. But there was something so otherworldly about him. He was hovering, like, six inches above the ground.

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.

Rock has always been the devil's music... I believe that rock & roll is dangerous... I feel that we're only heralding something even darker than ourselves.

I'm an instant star. Just add water and stir.

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

Ground control to Major Tom.

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

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

Trust nothing but your own experience.

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

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.

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

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

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

You can begin really looking for a relationship . . . when you can (appreciate) the whole concept of giving to someone, not just taking.

I'm drawn between the light and dark.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd was the first person in rock I had seen with makeup on. He wore black nail polish and lots of mascara and black eye shadow, and he was so mysterious. It was this androgynous thing I found absolutely fascinating.

In my madness I see your face in mine.

Never bored, so I'll never get old

Put on your red shoes, and dance the blues.

If it works, it's out of date.

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

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.

Make the best of every moment. We're not evolving. We're not going anywhere.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

And I think my spaceship knows which way to go.

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

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'm a thinker not a talker.

I'll place my love beneath the stars.

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'.

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.

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.

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

It makes me sad when I see artists who come alive when they go onstage, because, gee, I really come alive when I'm home.

I've been putting out the fire with gasoline.

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.

Look up here, I'm in heaven.

I was told that it was cool to fall in love, and that period was nothing like that to me. I gave too much of my time and energy to another person and they did the same to me and we started burning out against each other. And that is what is termed love.

The end comes when the infinites arrive.

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.

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

Rather than really have, like a close relationship to anything that's coming out today, people are just, they've got it on as background music. It's kind of the same way the cabdrivers use music; it's very disposable.

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.

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.

Secret thinker sometimes listening aloud.

I'm just an individual who doesn't feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I'm working for me.

Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.

It would be positively boring if minds were in tune.

I've come to the realisation that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing half the time...

People will keep the TV on even if a show is on that they hate - because, unfortunately, they've been programmed to do that.

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.

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

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

It was fun to be clever.

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

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.

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?

The moment you know you know you know.

Time may change me, but I can't trace time.

I'll ruin everything you are, I'll give you television.

People look to me to see what the spirit of the Seventies is.

I'm a born librarian with a sex drive.

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

I always had a repulsive sort of need to be something more than human.

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

My sexual nature is irrelevant. I'm an actor, I play roles, fragments of myself.

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

I'm still younger than Jagger... Most people are.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth.

I've never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.

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.

I'm not at ease with the word "love."

There's a terror in knowing what the world is about

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.

My work is really the accumulation of these different moods that I've had throughout my life and where they've taken me. I start looking back, and I think, I've actually created a life out of all this, out of these changes of mood. They've pushed me through all these years, and I seem to have a semblance of a life, and if I look very carefully, I can see some thematic design to it. There's some continuity.

I can ask for cigarettes in every language

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?

I can't keep my fingers out of any pies.

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'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

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.

Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I'm referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods presence in his life. He is the 21st century man.

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

Speak in extremes, it'll save you time.

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'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!

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

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

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

Turn and face the strange.

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

Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.

The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.

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

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.

You write down a paragraph or two describing several different subjects creating a kind of story ingredients-list, I suppose, and then cut the sentences into four or five-word sections; mix em up and reconnect them. You can get some pretty interesting idea combinations like this. You can use them as is or, if you have a craven need to not lose control, bounce off these ideas and write whole new sections.

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.