Bowie in quotes
From the newly famous singer of Space Oddity to the superstar of latter years, here is Bowie in his own words
Monday 11 January 2016 13.27 GMT
“I’m a writer … I really wouldn’t like to make singing a full-time occupation.”Melody Maker, 1969
“When I used to live in London everybody was always saying how ‘far out’ everything was. Down in Beckenham they’re into the real nitty gritty. They really enjoy life.” NME, 1971
Michael Watts: “Why aren’t you wearing your girl’s dress today?”
David Bowie: “Oh dear. You must understand that it’s not a woman’s. It’s a man’s dress.” Melody Maker, 1972
“I don’t see what’s so derisive about teeny-boppers. As far as I was concerned, the mind was at a most active stage at the age of about 14.” Disc, 1972
“Do you know how I met Iggy – and Lou Reed? I was at an RCA party at Max’s Kansas City in New York and was introduced to Lou. He immediately starting telling me some story about a guy who injected smack through his forehead – that’s typical Lou. Anyway, up comes this funny ragged, ragged little guy with broken teeth and Lou says: ‘Don’t talk to him, he’s a junkie’ – that was Iggy. You can’t help loving him, he’s so vulnerable.” Disc, 1973
“I don’t know whether I am against or for Gay Lib. I understand that they want to have people to be with, so that they’re not on their own. I mean, I understand that feeling so well, ‘Oh no love, you’re not alone’, absolutely. I mean, my feeling is that I need people a lot. I know that feeling so well. But on the other hand, to put that many people all together at once is perfect, perfect meat for the papers to pick upon and ridicule. When you’re all together like that, you can be stamped immediately. To be a guerilla, to be on your own, is far more rewarding in the end, if you have the determination to carry it through.” NME, 1973
“You’ve got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up. Then you can get a new form of liberalism. There’s some form of ghost force liberalism permeating the air in America, but it’s got to go, because it’s got no foundation at all, apart from a set of laws that were established way back in the bloody 50s and early 60s and have no bearing at all in the 70s. (So the best thing that can happen is for an extreme right government to come. It’ll do something positive at least to cause commotion in people and they’ll either accept the dictatorship or get rid of it.” RAM, 1975
“A lot of people provide me with quotes. They suggest all kinds of things to say and I do, because, really, I’m not very hip at all. Then I go away and spout it all out and that makes it easier for people to classify me.” Melody Maker, 1976
“I love rock’n’roll. Everything I’ve said about it in the past is all wrong. I love it. I love it because it’s so full of liars. I’ve never been in anything in my life where I could tell as many fibs and have so much fun with it.” Circus, 1976
“Somebody once said — who was it? It’s terribly important — that Harry Langdon, the silent comedian, cannot be taken on his own; you have to put him alongside that which went on around him, like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and Chaplin. He can only be seen by reference, and somebody said that about me, which is probably very true. I kind of quite like that, actually, that you can’t take me on my own. You can only use me as a form of reference!” NME, 1984
“I’ve got the fondest hopes for the fin de siècle. I see it as a symbolic sacrificial rite. I see it as a deviance, a pagan wish to appease gods, so we can move on. There’s a real spiritual starvation out there being filled by these mutations of what are barely-remembered rites and rituals. To take the place of the void left by a non-authoritative church. We have this panic button telling us it’s gonna be a colossal madness at the end of this century. And it WON’T be. The biggest problem we’ll have will be what to call it. Twenty-O-O? Twenty-O-Zero? Two Thousand? Well we lived through it; now what shall we call it?” Ikon, 1995
“As an artist, I was never interested in developing and having a continuum in style. For me, style was just something to use. It didn’t matter to me if it was hard rock or punk or whatever, it was whether or not it suited what I was trying to say at a particular point in time. It has always been essential to me that my public perception was such that I’d be left free to kind of float from one thing to another.” Music Connection, 1995
“I’ve got this thing about Croydon. It was my nemesis, I hated Croydon with a real vengeance. It represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from. I think it’s the most derogatory thing I can say about some body or something: ‘God, it’s so fucking Croydon!’ It was gonna be the big second city to London, but it never came to be. Bits of it they put up, these awful faceless office blocks, complete concrete hell. I suppose it looks beautiful now.”Q, 1999
“Fame itself, of course, doesn’t really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant. That must be pretty well known by now. I’m just amazed how fame is being posited as the be all and end all, and how many of these young kids who are being foisted on the public have been talked into this idea that anything necessary to be famous is all right. It’s a sad state of affairs. However arrogant and ambitious I think we were in my generation, I think the idea was that if you do something really good, you’ll become famous. The emphasis on fame itself is something new. Now it’s, to be famous you should do what it takes, which is not the same thing at all. And it will leave many of them with this empty feeling.”Performing Songwriter, 2003
DRAGON
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