Top 250 David Bowie Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Every time I’ve made a radical change it’s helped me feel buoyant as an artist.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

204. “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 .”

— David Bowie

205. “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.”

— David Bowie

206. “I’ve never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

208. “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.””

— David Bowie

209. “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.”

— David Bowie

210. “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.”

— David Bowie

211. “I’m not at ease with the word “love.””

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

214. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

217. “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...”

— David Bowie

218. “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.”

— David Bowie

219. “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.”

— David Bowie

220. “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.”

— David Bowie

221. “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.”

— David Bowie

222. “Sweet head, give you sweet head.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

224. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

226. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

229. “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.”

— David Bowie

230. “If you want it, boys, get it here, thing.”

— David Bowie

231. “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.”

— David Bowie

232. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

236. “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.”

— David Bowie

237. “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.”

— David Bowie

238. “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.”

— David Bowie

239. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

241. “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.”

— David Bowie

242. “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.”

— David Bowie

243. “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.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie

247. “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.”

— David Bowie

248. “I wanted to rewrite how rock music was perceived.”

— David Bowie

249. “There have been times when I’ve written something and it goes out and it comes back in a letter from some kid as to what they think about it and I’ve taken their analysis to heart so much that I have taken up his thing. Writing what my audience is telling me to write.”

— David Bowie

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

— David Bowie