Top 250 David Bowie Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Bully for you, chilly for me, got to get a raincheck on pain.”

— David Bowie

152. “I’m gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

155. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

158. “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.”

— David Bowie

159. “And the stars look very different today.”

— David Bowie

160. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

163. “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.”

— David Bowie

164. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

167. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

169. “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.”

— David Bowie

170. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

173. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

175. “The media is either our salvation or our death.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

177. “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.”

— David Bowie

178. “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.”

— David Bowie

179. “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.”

— David Bowie

180. “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.”

— David Bowie

181. “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.”

— David Bowie

182. “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!”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

184. “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.”

— David Bowie

185. “The end comes when the infinites arrive.”

— David Bowie

186. “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.”

— David Bowie

187. “I always write well in New York.”

— David Bowie

188. “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.”

— David Bowie

189. “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.”

— David Bowie

190. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

192. “I’ll ruin everything you are, I’ll give you television.”

— David Bowie

193. “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.”

— David Bowie

194. “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.”

— David Bowie

195. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

200. “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 indentify with that.”

— David Bowie