David Bowie Quotes
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Actually, my ambition at eight or nine years old was to be one of Little Richard's sax players, and that's when I got my first saxophone, a Selmer. It was a strange Bakelite material - that creamy plastic with all the gold keys on it. I had to get a job as a butcher's delivery boy to start paying for it.
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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.
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Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It's because I'm not quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on: 'Well, I'm almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.'
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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.
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[While] my life started taking on all the problems of addiction. So that took me off into an area where relationships were absolutely impossible to handle on any real level. . . . Even communicating with other people was impossible.
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The character thing really is sort of, for me, personally, rather ancient history.
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I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.
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I always write well in New York.
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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.
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Sits like a man, but smiles like a reptile.
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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.
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I'm very shy. That's probably one of the reasons I got so heavily into drugs.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To not be modest about it, you'll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I've worked with have done their best work by far with me.
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I have absolutely no interest in rock and roll. I'm just being David Bowie. Mick Jagger is rock and roll. I mean, I go out and my music is roughly the format of rock and roll, I use the chord changes of rock and roll, but I don't feel I'm a rock and roll artist. I'd be a terrible rock artist, absolutely ghastly.
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It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.
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[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.
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I think I am a lot more relaxed about what I have or haven't done.
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People look to me to see what the spirit of the Seventies is.
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Never bored, so I'll never get old
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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.
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Elvis was a major hero of mine. I was probably stupid enough to believe that having the same birthday as him actually meant something.