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.