All Time Famous David Bowie Quotes

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