Top 250 David Bowie Quotes (2025 Update)
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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. “He took it all too far, but boy could he play guitar.”

— David Bowie

105. “The moment you know you know you know.”

— David Bowie

106. “Secret thinker sometimes listening aloud.”

— David Bowie

107. “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

108. “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

109. “Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth.”

— David Bowie

110. “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

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

— David Bowie

112. “I can ask for cigarettes in every language.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

114. “I believe in Beatles, I believe my little soul has grown.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

117. “In my madness I see your face in mine.”

— David Bowie

118. “Zane zane zane, ouvre le chien.”

— David Bowie

119. “Ziggy played guitar, jamming good with Weird and Gilly.”

— David Bowie

120. “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

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

— David Bowie

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— 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. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “A career of nearly 40 years, is not very long.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

134. “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

135. “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

136. “Money goes to money heaven, body goes to body hell.”

— David Bowie

137. “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

138. “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

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

143. “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

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. “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

146. “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

147. “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.”

— David Bowie

148. “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

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

— David Bowie

150. “She’s a total bam bam.”

— David Bowie