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.
And it’s always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn’t want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you’re dead as an artist.
Having not really written any generational songs – I think maybe two or three of the songs that I’ve ever written have any bearing on the age of the listener. My stuff tends to be far more concerned with the spiritual and with subjects like isolation and being miserable.
I think that my fascination with clothes generally was motivated by trying to create the characters for the stage.
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.
Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived.
I think that the history of rock could be recycled in a different way and brought back into focus without the luggage that comes along with it.
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.
I’m not a natural performer. I don’t like performing very much.
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.
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.
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.
People look to me to see what the spirit of the Seventies is.
I’m not at ease with the word “love.”
I always write well in New York.
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.
Always drawn to the theatric, Bowie also performed in stage productions of “The Elephant Man” and just recently collaborated on “Lazarus,” an off-Broadway musical that’s a sequel to his 1976 role in the film “The Man Who Fell To Earth.”
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...
The coming together of people I find obscene as a principle. It is not human. It is not a natural thing as some people would have us believe.
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.