Latest David Bowie Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

  David Bowie

  Taken, Thinking, Design

• I spent so much time in my bedroom. It really was my entire world. I had books up there, my music up there, my record player. Going from my world upstairs out onto the street, I had to pass through this no-man's-land of the living room, you know, and out the front hall.

  David Bowie

  Book, Player, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  David Bowie

  Strong, Children, Father

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I could never, ever talk to my father. I really loved him, but we couldn't talk about anything together. There was this really British thing that being even remotely emotional was absolutely verboten.

  David Bowie

  Father, Emotional, Together

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I don't like people probing into my life, so I reveal as little as possible or lie about it as much as need be so as to give them something to write about.

  David Bowie

  Lying, Writing, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I'm not sure that an art career would have any benefit for me; I'm not sure it's what I want. I don't think I want to be a designer-rock artist.

  David Bowie

  Art, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  David Bowie

  Art, Real, Grace

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  David Bowie

  Successful, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I went mainstream in a major way with the song "Let's Dance." And what I found I had done was put a box around myself. It was very hard for people to see me as anything other than the person in the suit who did "Let's Dance," and it was driving me mad - because it took all my passion for experimenting away.

  David Bowie

  Song, Passion, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I just put drugs down to luck. I persevere quite honestly, and I've got a fair amount of discipline that keeps me out of deep water.

  David Bowie

  Discipline, Water, Drug

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  David Bowie

  Mother, Father, Commitment

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The truest form of any form of revolutionary left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, and Allan Ginsberg's period. Excuse me but that was where it was at. The hippies, I'm afraid, don't know what's happening.

  David Bowie

  Hippie, Revolutionary, Excuse

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The underground went really underground. Grand Funk, and all these people man are the moderate's choice of music. Underground is Yoko Ono, The Black Poets. These people scare the hell out of most freaks. They laugh at Yoko Ono, but it's the whole cliché.

  David Bowie

  Men, Laughing, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Touring with Iggy Pop was something to do. It was good fun. I got drunk a lot.

  David Bowie

  Fun, Drunk, Good Fun

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• It was like treading water all through the '60s, and when 1970 kicked in, I thought "We're here. Right." God, this is exciting. I'm going to go for it now. I really felt it was my time. Then Marc Bolan did it first. That really pissed me off.

  David Bowie

  Water, Exciting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Capitalism can be alright, I mean Karl Marx didn't live to see what Roosevelt did with that Depression. He pulled everybody out of that Depression and everybody hated Franklin Roosevelt. He got into office four times. One after the other, with everybody saying, he can't get in again. Everybody voted for Roosevelt four times and he did a hell of a lot.

  David Bowie

  Mean, Office, Hell

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I just tried everything out - I mean, everything. Even my sexual orientation; I was just searching for what I really wanted. And I didn't quite know.

  David Bowie

  Mean

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  David Bowie

  Problem

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  David Bowie

  Mean, Artist, Music Is

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I really floated around in the '60s, because I felt comfortable with nothing.

  David Bowie

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 1961 was when I was really into clothes. I left school at 15 and started copying a bloke who used to go up on the train to London with me; Leslie, I think his name was. He was like, top mod of his own area. He wore Italian jackets with white linen jeans. Boy, was that cool! I mean, that's in style now - it's very much the L.A. look. But he was wearing it then, and it looked supercool.

  David Bowie

  School, Mean, Italian

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  David Bowie

  Eye, Makeup, Black

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• At no point did I ever doubt I would be as near as anybody could be to England's Elvis Presley. Even from eight or nine years old, I thought, Well, I'll be the greatest rock star in England. I just made up my mind.

  David Bowie

  Doubt, Mind, Rock Star

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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.

  David Bowie

  Ambition, Boys, Player

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I think I am a lot more relaxed about what I have or haven't done.

  David Bowie

  Thinking, Done, Relaxed

  "POP MUSIC : David Bowie: The Man Who Fell . . . Then Got Up Again". Interview with Robert Hilburn, articles.latimes.com. April 4, 1993.