David Bowie Quotes
Singer-songwriter
I'm an instant star. Just add water and stir.
I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.
Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.
I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.
It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.
I'm not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with potential of a superman. I'm living on.
The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.
Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity.
I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I'm not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.
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.
As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn't really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn't have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.
Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.
I re-invented my image so many times that I'm in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman.
I've never responded well to entrenched negative thinking.
Fame itself... doesn't really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.
I feel confident imposing change on myself. It's a lot more fun progressing than looking back. That's why I need to throw curve balls.
There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It's always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.
On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.
When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.
I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.
As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I've got left?
The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic.
That's the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God - so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true... Hell, don't pose me that one.
Art was, seriously, the only thing I'd ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.
When I'm stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic.
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 change my mind a lot. I usually don't agree with what I say very much. I'm an awful liar.
I'm an early riser. I get up between five and six, have coffee, and read for a couple of hours before everyone else gets up.
All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.
I'm just an individual who doesn't feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I'm working for me.
It would be my guess that Madonna is not a very happy woman. From my own experience, having gone through persona changes like that, that kind of clawing need to be the center of attention is not a pleasant place to be.
Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.
If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.
For me, the world that I inhabit in reality is probably a very different world than the one people expect that I would be in.
With a suit, always wear big British shoes, the ones with large welts. There's nothing worse than dainty little Italian jobs at the end of the leg line.
Everything I read about hitting a midlife crisis was true. I had such a struggle letting go of youthful things and learning how to exist and have enthusiasm while settling into the comfort of an older age.
Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.
I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.
However, there's no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.
Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It's because I'm not quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on: 'Well, I'm almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.'
My father worked for a children's home called Dr. Barnardo's Homes. They're a charity.
What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That's what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.
I never really felt like a rock singer or a rock star or whatever.
I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.
Now I realize that from '72 through to about '76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn't have been more rock star.
You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.
Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.
I'm very good at what I do, and I don't turn my hand to something unless I'm very good at it, frankly.
But I'm pretty good with collaborative thinking. I work well with other people.
Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.
It is amazing how a new child can refocus one's direction seconds after its birth.
What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.
I believe that I often bring out the best in somebody's talents.
I'm not very articulate.
There are half a dozen subjects that I return to time and time again, and that doesn't bother me. Because most of my favorite writers do that, to hunt down the same topic or theme from different directions each time.
I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.
I don't see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.
I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it's so essential that when I'm involved in the actual process, my so-called 'real life' becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.
I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.
I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement - it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.
I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.
From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.
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.
All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.
Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.
An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I'm from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.
I'm not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.
I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn't have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that - except I couldn't afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.
But I've got to think of myself as the luckiest guy. Robert Johnson only had one album's worth of work as his legacy. That's all that life allowed him.
Frankly, if I could get away with not having to perform, I'd be very happy. It's not my favorite thing to do.
Age doesn't bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It's the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.
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 still derive immense pleasure from remembering how many hod-carrying brickies were encouraged to put on lurex tights and mince up and down the high street, having been assured by know-it-alls like me that a smidgen of blusher really attracted the birds.
I'm wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It's a real enjoyment.
I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.
I never could get over the fact that The Pixies formed, worked and separated without America taking them to its heart or even recognizing their existence for the most part.
I don't profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.
Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that - that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.
I'm not actually a very keen performer. I like putting shows together. I like putting events together. 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 think much has been made of this alter ego business. I mean, I actually stopped creating characters in 1975 - for albums, anyway.
I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I've done for 25 years. I don't need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.
The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It's either 'rawk' or it's not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.
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.
Funk, I don't think I have anything to do with funk. I've never considered myself funky.
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'll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.
I don't crave applause. I'm not one of those guys who comes alive on stage. I'm much more alive at home, I think.
For me, often, there's such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I'm going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don't know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.
I think in the '70s that there was a general feeling of chaos, a feeling that the idea of the '60s as 'ideal' was a misnomer. Nothing seemed ideal anymore. Everything seemed in-between.
The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.
Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It's become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.
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.
I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places.
There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.
I think, generally, I just cannot really envision life without writing and producing records and singing.
Being a hybrid maker off and on over the years, I'm very comfortable with the idea and have been the subject of quite a few pretty good mash-ups myself.
Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I've seen on some of the songs that I've written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.
I'm responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.
I went through all the musicians in my life who I admire as bright, intelligent, virtuosic players.
Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left.