David Bowie, born David Robert Jones on January 8, 1947, was an iconic English singer, songwriter, and actor. He was a leading figure in the music industry and is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. Bowie’s career spanned over five decades, and he explored various musical styles and personas, making him a chameleon of the music world.
Some of Bowie’s most famous personas include Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and the Thin White Duke. His albums like “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” “Hunky Dory,” “Heroes,” and “Let’s Dance” are considered classics.
Apart from his contributions to music, Bowie was also known for his acting career. He appeared in films such as “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” “Labyrinth,” and “Basquiat.”
David Bowie passed away on January 10, 2016, just two days after his 69th birthday, following a private 18-month battle with liver cancer. His death was a significant loss to the world of music and art, but his legacy continues to influence and inspire generations of artists.
David Bowie Quotes
1. “Religion is for people who fear hell, spirituality is for people who have been there.”
— David Bowie
2. “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”
— David Bowie
3. “If we could be heroes, if just for one day.”
— David Bowie
4. “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.”
— David Bowie
5. “I’m a thinker not a talker.”
— David Bowie
6. “Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.”
— David Bowie
7. “Turn and face the strange.”
— David Bowie
8. “There’s a starman waiting in the sky, he’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds.”
— David Bowie
9. “Ground control to Major Tom.”
— David Bowie
10. “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.”
— David Bowie
11. “Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.”
— David Bowie
12. “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.”
— David Bowie
13. “I’ve come to the realizations that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing half the time.”
— David Bowie
14. “Keep your ’ electric 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!”
— David Bowie
15. “The minute you know you’re on safe ground, you’re dead.”
— David Bowie
16. “Let the children use it, let the children lose it, let all the children boogie.”
— David Bowie
17. “If you come from art, you’ll always be art.”
— David Bowie
18. “And I think my spaceship knows which way to go.”
— David Bowie
19. “You’d like to know me well, but I’ve got things inside my head that even I can’t face.”
— David Bowie
20. “You can neither win nor lose if you don’t run the race.”
— David Bowie
21. “Speak in extremes, it’ll save you time.”
— David Bowie
22. “For here, I’m sitting in a tin can, far above the world. Planet earth is blue, and there is nothing I can do.”
— David Bowie
23. “Put on your red shoes, and dance the blues.”
— David Bowie
24. “I’m afraid of Americans.”
— David Bowie
25. “I’ll place my love beneath the stars.”
— David Bowie
26. “Make the best of every moment. We’re not evolving. We’re not going anywhere.”
— David Bowie
27. “Wham, bam, thank you Ma’am.”
— David Bowie
28. “Once you lose that sense of wonder at being alive, you’re pretty much on the way out…”
— David Bowie
29. “No more free steps to heaven.”
— David Bowie
30. “This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll; this is genocide.”
— David Bowie
31. “I’ll stick with you baby for a thousand years.”
— David Bowie
32. “Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold.”
— David Bowie
33. “Nothing prepared me for your smile.”
— David Bowie
34. “Trust nothing but your own experience.”
— David Bowie
35. “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.”
— David Bowie
36. “I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity…”
— David Bowie
37. “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.”
— David Bowie
38. “If it works, it’s out of date.”
— David Bowie
39. “Don’t let me hear you say life takes you nowhere, angel.”
— David Bowie
40. “You can’t stand still on one point for your entire life.”
— David Bowie
41. “I read the news today, oh boy.”
— David Bowie
42. “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.”
— David Bowie
43. “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.”
— David Bowie
44. “If I never wake again, I certainly will have lived while I was alive.”
— David Bowie
45. “I think music should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium.”
— David Bowie
46. “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.”
— David Bowie
47. “Fame puts you there where things are hollow.”
— David Bowie
48. “The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from.”
— David Bowie
49. “I’m drawn between the light and dark.”
— David Bowie
50. “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.”
— David Bowie
51. “Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.”
— David Bowie
52. “Listen to me, don’t listen to me. Talk to me, don’t talk to me.”
— David Bowie
53. “In your fear, seek only peace. In your fear, seek only love.”
— David Bowie
54. “Feeling so gay, feeling so gay.”
— David Bowie
55. “I’ve been putting out the fire with gasoline.”
— David Bowie
56. “Making love with his ego.”
— David Bowie
57. “Church on time, makes me party.”
— David Bowie
58. “I surrounded myself with people who indulged my ego. They treated me as though I was Ziggy Stardust or one of my characters, never realizing that David Jones might be behind it.”
— David Bowie
59. “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?”
— David Bowie
60. “Rock’s always been the devil’s music.”
— David Bowie
61. “He says he’s a beautician and sells you nutrition, and keeps all your dead hair for making underwear.”
— David Bowie
62. “Never bored, so I’ll never get old.”
— David Bowie
63. “Hitler was the first superstar.”
— David Bowie
64. “The sun machine is coming down, and we’re gonna have a party.”
— David Bowie
65. “Some people are marching together and some on their own. Others are running, the smaller ones crawl. But some sit in silence.”
— David Bowie
66. “It’s only forever, not long at all.”
— David Bowie
67. “I’ll paint you moments of gold, I’ll spin you Valentine evenings…”
— David Bowie
68. “I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.”
— David Bowie
69. “I don’t live for the stage. I don’t live for an audience.”
— David Bowie
70. “Sits like a man, but smiles like a reptile.”
— David Bowie
71. “I made a more mature approach to industrial music.”
— David Bowie
72. “I can see light at the end of the tunnel and it isn’t a train.”
— David Bowie
73. “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.”
— David Bowie
74. “I kind of miss that “becoming” stage, as most times you really don’t know what’s around the corner. Now, of course, I’ve kind of knocked on the door and heard a muffled answer. Nevertheless, I still don’t know what the voice is saying, or even what language it’s in.”
— David Bowie
75. “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.”
— David Bowie
76. “Strung out on lasers and slash back blazers.”
— David Bowie
77. “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.”
— David Bowie
78. “Why bother choosing a certain chair? Because that chair says something about you.”
— David Bowie
79. “Is it Nice in your snowstorm- freezing your brain? Do you think that your face looks the same?”
— David Bowie
80. “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.”
— David Bowie
81. “I don’t expect the human race to progress in too many areas. However, having a child with an ear infection makes one hugely grateful for antibiotics.”
— David Bowie
82. “Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all. I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas.”
— David Bowie
83. “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.”
— David Bowie
84. “Oooh, fashion, we are the goon squad and were coming to town, beep beep.”
— David Bowie
85. “I’m afraid of Americans; I’m afraid of the world; I’m afraid I can’t help it.”
— David Bowie
86. “I think the only music I didn’t listen to was country and western, and that holds to this day.”
— David Bowie
87. “I woke up one day and realized I was a closet hetero.”
— David Bowie
88. “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.”
— David Bowie
89. “I’m an instant star, just add water.”
— David Bowie
90. “You know, I don’t feel fifty. I feel not a day over forty-nine. It’s incredible. I’m bouncy, I feel bouncy.”
— David Bowie
91. “I never really got the book together for the thing, so I had all the songs and the characters. But by the time we’d gotten it on the road and I’d been doing it for 18 months, oh God, I couldn’t wait to move on to something else.”
— David Bowie
92. “I never really had much of an interest in fashion.”
— David Bowie
93. “I’d rather stay here with all the madmen than perish with the sadmen roaming free.”
— David Bowie
94. “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.”
— David Bowie
95. “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.””
— David Bowie
96. “I’m bemused by the whole Robbie Williams aspect of British pop. Posh Spice? It all looks like cruise ship entertainment to me.”
— David Bowie
97. “I don’t know how many times someone has come up to me and said, “Hey, Lets dance!“. I hate dancing. God, it’s stupid.”
— David Bowie
98. “Who’ll love Aladdin Sane? Battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise.”
— David Bowie
99. “We slit the Catholic throat, stoned the poor on such slogans as wish you could hear and love is all we need.”
— David Bowie
100. “There’s a thing that just as you go to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated that you will never go below the dream stage. And I’ve used that quite a lot and it keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed.”
— David Bowie
101. “Hear this Robert Zimmerman, I wrote a song for you, about a strange young man called Dylan with a voice like sand and glue.”
— David Bowie
102. “Would you carry a razor, in case, just in case of depression?”
— David Bowie
103. “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.”
— David Bowie
104. “The moment you know you know you know.”
— David Bowie
105. “Secret thinker sometimes listening aloud.”
— David Bowie
106. “Pop stars are capable of growing old. Mick Jagger at 50 will be marvelous – a battered old roue – I can just see him. An aging rock star doesn’t have to opt out life. When I’m 50, I’ll prove it…”
— David Bowie
107. “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.”
— David Bowie
108. “Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth.”
— David Bowie
109. “I can ask for cigarettes in every language.”
— David Bowie
110. “I think fame itself is not a rewarding thing. The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants.”
— David Bowie
111. “There’s a terror in knowing what the world is about.”
— David Bowie
112. “I believe in Beatles, I believe my little soul has grown.”
— David Bowie
113. “We can’t stop trying til we break up our minds, til the sun drips blood on the seedy young knight.”
— David Bowie
114. “I got a bad migraine that lasted 3 years, and the pills I took made by fingers disappear.”
— David Bowie
115. “In my madness I see your face in mine.”
— David Bowie
116. “Zane zane zane, ouvre le chien.”
— David Bowie
117. “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.”
— David Bowie
118. “Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly.”
— David Bowie
119. “Some make you sing and some make you scream. One makes you wish that you’d never been seen. But there’s a shop on the corner that’s selling papier mache, making bullet-proof faces, Charlie Manson, Cassius Clay. If you want it, boys, get it here, thing.”
— David Bowie
120. “My sexual nature is irrelevant. I’m an actor, I play roles, fragments of myself.”
— David Bowie
121. “Hey man, I gotta straighten my face. This mellow thighed chick just put my spine out of place.”
— David Bowie
122. “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.”
— David Bowie
123. “I’m quite certain that the audience that I’ve got for my stuff don’t listen to the lyrics.”
— David Bowie
124. “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…”
— David Bowie
125. “Illusion I will be, for I’ve never been a sinner.”
— David Bowie
126. “I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work it’s no longer his.”
— David Bowie
127. “I don’t believe in proper cinema; it doesn’t have the strength of television. People having to go out to the cinema is really archaic. I’d much rather sit at home.”
— David Bowie
128. “I’m English. I can’t accept happiness that easily. There’s got to be a trick in there somewhere.”
— David Bowie
129. “Elvis was a major hero of mine. I was probably stupid enough to believe that having the same birthday as him actually meant something.”
— David Bowie
130. “The public, obviously, they takes things in a very simplest fashion and so they should. That’s why we have such wonderful television.”
— David Bowie
131. “A career of nearly 40 years, is not very long.”
— David Bowie
132. “I think hip-hop is actually one of the most challenging things that’s happened in music in a long time.”
— David Bowie
133. “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.”
— David Bowie
134. “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.”
— David Bowie
135. “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.”
— David Bowie
136. “Money goes to money heaven, body goes to body hell.”
— David Bowie
137. “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.”
— David Bowie
138. “I was always accused of being cold and unfeeling. It was because I was intimidated about touching people.”
— David Bowie
139. “Sexuality and where it is going is an extraordinary question, for I don’t see it going anywhere. It is with me, and that’s it.”
— David Bowie
140. “Visions of swastikas in my head, plans for everyone. It’s in the Whites of my eyes.”
— David Bowie
141. “All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.”
— David Bowie
142. “I’ve learned to relax and be my present age and my present position. I feel comfortable on my mid-thirties. It doesn’t seem such an alien place to be.”
— David Bowie
143. “I’m a person who can take on the guises of people I meet. I’m a collector, and I collect personalities and ideas.”
— David Bowie
144. “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.”
— David Bowie
145. “Someday, I’m gonna write a poem in a letter; Someday, I’m gonna get that faculty together.”
— David Bowie
146. “He took it all too far, but boy could he play guitar.”
— David Bowie
147. “The only real failure is trying to second-guess the taste of an audience. Nothing comes out of that except a kind of inward humiliation.”
— David Bowie
148. “Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.”
— David Bowie
149. “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 intellectual. I’m a pop singer for Christ’s sake. As a person, I’m fairly uncomplicated.”
— David Bowie
150. “She’s a total bam bam.”
— David Bowie
151. “I’m gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones.”
— David Bowie
152. “Bully for you, chilly for me, got to get a raincheck on pain.”
— David Bowie
153. “It’s always time to question what has become standard and established.”
— David Bowie
154. “There was a time in America not long ago when rock ‘n’ roll was called race music, and white kids who wanted to go see Chuck Berry were completely forbidden.”
— David Bowie
155. “My father worked for a children’s home called Dr. Barnardo’s Homes. They’re a charity.”
— David Bowie
156. “Mine is really – Ziggy Stardust, characters, “Let’s Dance.” That’s me in the American.”
— David Bowie
157. “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.”
— David Bowie
158. “There’s a taste in my mouth and it’s no taste at all.”
— David Bowie
159. “It always felt like you were trying too hard to look like the audience or something. That whole thing about the artistic integrity, which, of course, I’ve never bought into – with any artist. It’s just not a real thing.”
— David Bowie
160. “She asked for my love and I gave her a dangerous mind.”
— David Bowie
161. “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.”
— David Bowie
162. “I think that my fascination with clothes generally was motivated by trying to create the characters for the stage.”
— David Bowie
163. “And the stars look very different today.”
— David Bowie
164. “I really believe that Bob Dylan and others have speeded up the changes. Pacifism has found a voice at last.”
— David Bowie
165. “Fame, what you like is in the Limo. Fame, what you get is no tomorrow.”
— David Bowie
166. “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.”
— David Bowie
167. “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.”
— David Bowie
168. “I turned myself to face me, but I’ve never caught a glimpse of how the others must see the faker.”
— David Bowie
169. “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.”
— David Bowie
170. “I’m very shy. That’s probably one of the reasons I got so heavily into drugs.”
— David Bowie
171. “I think everything that I learned about stagecraft and carrying through – creating a through point for a theatrical device.”
— David Bowie
172. “What I like doing is writing and recording and much more on the, I guess, the – on that creative level. It’s fun interpreting songs and all that, but I wouldn’t like it as a living.”
— David Bowie
173. “The younger people get into the lyrics in a different way; there’s much more of a tactile understanding, which is the way I prefer it.”
— David Bowie
174. “The best DJs in the world know how to pull in music from all over the place and make it work as a cohesive whole.”
— David Bowie
175. “I’m not sure whether it is me changing my mind, or whether I lie a lot.”
— David Bowie
176. “My mother was a housewife. Both from – well, my father was from a farming family, agricultural family in the north of England. And my mother came from a very working class.”
— David Bowie
177. “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!”
— David Bowie
178. “I think much has been made of this alter ego business. I mean, I actually stopped creating characters in 1975 – for albums, anyway.”
— David Bowie
179. “The end comes when the infinites arrive.”
— David Bowie
180. “The world that I inhabit in reality is probably very different world than the one people expect that I would be in. It is quite sedate. It’s far removed from a lot of what they would feel to be the limousine traveling rock existence, or whatever.”
— David Bowie
181. “I met my wife because we were both going out with the same guy.”
— David Bowie
182. “People are always throwing things at me that I’ve said and I say that I didn’t mean anything.”
— David Bowie
183. “The media is either our salvation or our death.”
— David Bowie
184. “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.”
— David Bowie
185. “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.”
— David Bowie
186. “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.”
— David Bowie
187. “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.”
— David Bowie
188. “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.”
— David Bowie
189. “I always write well in New York.”
— David Bowie
190. “Lou Reed is the most important definitive writer in modern rock. Not because of the stuff that he does, but the direction that he will take it.”
— David Bowie
191. “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.”
— David Bowie
192. “When I was 9 years old, I wanted to be the baritone sax player in the Little Richard band.”
— David Bowie
193. “I realized the other day that I’ve lived in New York longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. It’s amazing: I am a New Yorker. It’s strange; I never thought I would be.”
— David Bowie
194. “Critics I don’t understand. They get too intellectual. They’re not very well-versed in street talk; it takes them longer to say it. So they have to do it in dictionaries and they take longer to say it.”
— David Bowie
195. “You go through stages where you wonder whether you are Christ, or just looking for him.”
— David Bowie
196. “When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.”
— David Bowie
197. “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.”
— David Bowie
198. “I’ll ruin everything you are, I’ll give you television.”
— David Bowie
199. “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.”
— David Bowie
200. “Every time I’ve made a radical change it’s helped me feel buoyant as an artist.”
— David Bowie
