In fact, in Europe, I’m more kind of this bloke what writes lots of stuff.

Things have to hit for the moment. That’s one of the reasons I’m into video; the image has to hit immediately. I adore video and the whole cutting up of it

When you are an artist you can turn your hand to anything, in any style. Once you have the tools then all the artforms are the same in the end.

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.

I thought that I could do some kind of vehicle involving rock musicals and presenting rock and characters and storyline in a completely different fashion.

I had a fantasy that i’d drift up to Scotland and spend my life as a faux bodhisattua.

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.

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

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.

Since early middle ages when people generally taking away the barbarity of their like, were pretty content. Although it was all an illicit contentment, what with the slave systems all over the world, in England especially, the peasants and the master, etc. People were incredibly content.

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 wanted to rewrite how rock music was perceived.

The people who don’t know so much about me regard me more sexually.

I don’t mind trying it out and making sure something seems to work well.

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.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

I’ve made over 25 studio albums, and I think probably I’ve made two real stinkers in my time, and some not-bad albums, and some really good albums. I’m proud of what I’ve done. In fact it’s been a good ride.

TV has eaten up everything else, and Warhol films are all that are left, which is fabulous. Pork could become the next I Love Lucy, the great American domestic comedy. It’s about how people really live, not like Lucy, who never touched dishwater. It’s about people living and hustling to survive.

I liked rock music, I kind of moved into that sphere, somehow thinking that somewhere along the line I’d be able to put the two together. And I suppose I very nearly did with the Ziggy character.

In fact, everything I do is about the conceptualizing and realization of a piece of work, whether it’s the recording or the performance side.

I really wanted to do, more than anything else, up until I was around 16, 17, was write musicals.

If you want it, boys, get it here, thing.

There’s something about the style of living in the country that they feel, “This is what represents me.” So style is about the philosophy of how we create our civilization.

But I’m pretty good with collaborative thinking. I work well with other people

I’m not a natural performer. I don’t like performing very much.

I usually don’t agree with what I say very much. I’m an awful liar.

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

I guess Ziggy would have been the perfect vehicle to have done with.

It’s much easier for me to say that, the kind of music I didn’t listen to was pretty much that. I mean everything, from jazz to classical to popular. And Tibetan horns were a great part of it in 1966, ’67.

Tony Visconti and I had been wanting to work together again for a few years now. Both of us had fairly large commitments and for a long time we couldn’t see a space in which we could get anything together.

I would like to believe that people knew what they were fighting for and why they wanted a revolution, and exactly what it was within that they didn’t like.

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

The character thing really is sort of, for me, personally, rather ancient history.

A lot of people provide me with quotes. They suggest all kinds of things to say and I do, really, because I’m not very hip at all.

People got extremely comfortable with being able to turn on their television and see MTV say, “This guy’s hot you should buy this record.”

Some of us, I think, us small, pompous arty ones probably read too much George Steiner and kind of got the idea that we were entering to this kind of post-culture age and that we’d better do something postmodernist – quickly, before somebody else did.

Sweet head, give you sweet head.

If I wasn’t going through a thing where I was also being my characters offstage, uh, I’m much happier just wearing the most low-profile things that I can come up with just so I can get down the street…

Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

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

Every time I’ve made a radical change it’s helped me feel buoyant as an artist.

It’s odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about ‘old and other times’ as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory.

I’ve never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.

Radio in England is nonexistent. It’s very bad English use of a media system, typically English use.

The coming together of people I find obscene as a principle. It is not human. It is not a natural thing as some people would have us believe.

I’m not at ease with the word “love.”

The only time that I’ve adopted characterization again since that point, for my own albums, has been an album called “Outside” that I did with Brian Eno .

I don’t think I did anything that my contemporaries didn’t; it was just that I was the only one who talked about it. In the Sixties anyone who had a sense of style seemed to be gay. I wanted to identify with that.

There seem to be a lot of black artists making very good videos that I’m surprised aren’t being used on MTV.

I guess, people like myself and Roxy Music that had a different agenda about taking up music.

I could never have done what I did without being involved with Lindsay Kemp’s company.

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.

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 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.

When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.

You go through stages where you wonder whether you are Christ, or just looking for him.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I always write well in New York.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I was 9 years old, I wanted to be the baritone sax player in the Little Richard band.

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.

People are always throwing things at me that I’ve said and I say that I didn’t mean anything.

Illusion I will be, for I’ve never been a sinner.

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!

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.

The end comes when the infinites arrive.

I think much has been made of this alter ego business. I mean, I actually stopped creating characters in 1975 – for albums, anyway.

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.

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.

The media is either our salvation or our death.

I think everything that I learned about stagecraft and carrying through – creating a through point for a theatrical device.

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.

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.

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

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

And the stars look very different today.

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.

I turned myself to face me, but I’ve never caught a glimpse of how the others must see the faker.

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.

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.

Fame, what you like is in the Limo. Fame, what you get is no tomorrow.

I think that my fascination with clothes generally was motivated by trying to create the characters for the stage.

I really believe that Bob Dylan and others have speeded up the changes. Pacifism has found a voice at last.

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.

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.

Mine is really – Ziggy Stardust, characters, “Let’s Dance.” That’s me in the American.

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

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.

There’s a taste in my mouth and it’s no taste at all.

My father worked for a children’s home called Dr. Barnardo’s Homes. They’re a charity.

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.

It’s always time to question what has become standard and established.

Bully for you, chilly for me, got to get a raincheck on pain.

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.

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.

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

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.

He took it all too far, but boy could he play guitar.

omeday, I’m gonna write a poem in a letter; Someday, I’m gonna get that faculty together.

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’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.

Visions of swastikas in my head, plans for everyone. It’s in the Whites of my eyes.

I’m a person who can take on the guises of people I meet. I’m a collector, and I collect personalities and ideas.

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

I was always accused of being cold and unfeeling. It was because I was intimidated about touching people.

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.

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.

Money goes to money heaven, body goes to body hell.

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.

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 think hip-hop is actually one of the most challenging things that’s happened in music in a long time.

The public, obviously, they takes things in a very simplest fashion and so they should. That’s why we have such wonderful television.

I’m English. I can’t accept happiness that easily. There’s got to be a trick in there somewhere.

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

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.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work it’s no longer his.

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…

I’m quite certain that the audience that I’ve got for my stuff don’t listen to the lyrics.

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

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.

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.

Hey man, I gotta straighten my face. This mellow thighed chick just put my spine out of 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.

In my madness I see your face in mine.

I believe in Beatles, I believe my little soul has grown.

I got a bad migraine that lasted 3 years, and the pills I took made by fingers disappear.

We can’t stop trying til we break up our minds, til the sun drips blood on the seedy young knight.

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

I can ask for cigarettes in every language.

There’s a terror in knowing what the world is about.

Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth.

Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all. I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas.

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…

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.

Secret thinker sometimes listening aloud.

The moment you know you know you know.

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.

Would you carry a razor, in case, just in case of depression?

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

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.

We slit the Catholic throat, stoned the poor on such slogans as wish you could hear and love is all we need.

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.

Who’ll love Aladdin Sane? Battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise.

I’m bemused by the whole Robbie Williams aspect of British pop. Posh Spice? It all looks like cruise ship entertainment to me.

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.”

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.

I’d rather stay here with all the madmen than perish with the sadmen roaming free.

I never really had much of an interest in fashion.

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.

You know, I don’t feel fifty. I feel not a day over forty-nine. It’s incredible. I’m bouncy, I feel bouncy.

I’m an instant star, just add water.

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.

I think the only music I didn’t listen to was country and western, and that holds to this day.

I woke up one day and realized I was a closet hetero.

Oooh, fashion, we are the goon squad and were coming to town, beep beep.

I’m afraid of Americans; I’m afraid of the world; I’m afraid I can’t help it.

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.

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.

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.

Is it Nice in your snowstorm- freezing your brain? Do you think that your face looks the same?

Why bother choosing a certain chair? Because that chair says something about you.

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.

It’s only forever, not long at all.

Strung out on lasers and slash back blazers.

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.

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.

I can see light at the end of the tunnel and it isn’t a train.

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.

I made a more mature approach to industrial music.

Sits like a man, but smiles like a reptile.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

I don’t live for the stage. I don’t live for an audience.

I’ll paint you moments of gold, I’ll spin you Valentine evenings…

Hitler was the first superstar.

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

Never bored, so I’ll never get old.

The sun machine is coming down, and we’re gonna have a party.

He says he’s a beautician and sells you nutrition, and keeps all your dead hair for making underwear.

Rock’s always been the devil’s music.

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 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.

Church on time, makes me party.

Making love with his ego.

I’ve been putting out the fire with gasoline.

Feeling so gay, feeling so gay.