"One reason I hate interviews is I hate seeing quotes of mine in print [to] haunt me later. Hell, I'm a terrible liar. I change my mind all the time."
"I have nothing to say about the new album. Can I go now?" [during an interview about his new album in 1999]
"I?m never gonna try and play black music because I?m white. Singularly white!"
"I don't seriously think I could offer anybody else any advice at all. It would be about as profound as Alfred E. Neuman."
"Any list of advice I have to offer to a muscian always ends with, 'If it itches, go and see a doctor.'" - on getting an honary degree from Boston's Berklee College of Music
"...for the British and Europeans. Notice that I did not include the British as Europeans. I wonder if that's a good thing? Who knows... I'll ask an American." -from a chat on Bowienet
Asked whether he thinks he is a good actor: "I took you in, didn't I? I rest my make-up case."
"I'm an instant star; just add water."
"Talking about art is like dancing about architecture."
"Take away his light show and he's nothing!...Oh, that might look cold in print." - on Moby
"You can't ignore one's scrapbook"
"I want to act in a film and dance in a musical."
"Questions are just something you think on the way to the answers, I think Lennon should probably have said that."
"I brought in aspects of the theatre that hadn't been used in rock before -- Kabuki and Expressionism."
"Well, I never had much luck telling people I was an actor, so I let everybody figure it out. I mean, a man does what he has to do."
"I steal from everybody."
"Call me Ziggy."
"I feel like the American is the loneliest person in the world."
"I hadn't changed my views much since I was about 12 when I read Kerouac's On the Road."
"I knew I should have worn shorts." - on performing in the August heat
"I've always said I'm terribly vulnerable as a writer. You can just look at the records and see what I'm feeling."
"I refuse to be thought of as mediocre."
"When I write a song, sometimes a month later I don't understand it. That's why I enjoy listening to my early stuff."
"I think every rock and roll singer that ever lived is me. I'm very much the conglomerate figure."
"I'm tired of being a Gulliver . . . I'm tired of the weight of the world on my shoulders."
"I want to be Prime Minister of England one day."
"Ziggy is partially autobiographical and partly someone else. He's the ultimate parasite . . . Please don't ask me to theorize on Ziggy . . . having written it down, it's all too personal. He's a monster and I'm Dr. Frankenstein. He's my brother and, God, I love him."
"I WAS the Space Invader."
"I guess there's an element of solitude, loneliness, and imprisonment in every album. I can't get out of that."
". . . I wanted to prove myself in some field as an artist and I didn't think I was a very good painter, so I went to music."
"We reinvented culture the way we wanted it - with great big shoes."
"Yes, I became a rock star; I could have been a painter."
"Tombstone! . . . I'd like a memorial. I'd never be content with a tombstone."
"It's good to retain one's individuality. The only reason one uses the Sinatra figure to explain what I mean about maintaining a persona is that he is about the only person who has done it. He's someone who is not just an actor or a singer. He transcends all those areas. He's even something of a public figure. That's what I want to be felt about me."
"I change my mind a lot. I usually don't agree with what I say very much. I'm an awful liar."
"I'm the perfect example of the victim of technology. I think it's disastrous."
"All you have to do is wear a hat, dark glasses and carry a Greek newspaper"
- on going incognito
"Record sales can only do so much for your self-confidence."
"My father died and a week later, I had a hit record. The juxtaposition was like pantomime, a comic tragedy."
"I'm a storyteller, an electronic minstrel."
"I wrote the whole thing as a hymn ["Word on a Wing"]. What better way can a man give thanks for achieving something that he had dreamed of achieving, than doing it with a hymn?"
"I am a born eclectic."
"I don't make changes to confuse anyone. I'm just searching. That's what causes me to change. I'm just searching for myself."
"I'm in the process of living, not the result."
"I've always had an immature attitude toward mental health detectors. There was a stigma attached to the whole thing which I felt was inhuman and I just didn't want to become involved in. Also, I had a slight impression that I might go to a hospital and not get out again."
"I've always been a great fan of diversification, eh? At one period I had the whole lot going. I was a Buddhist mime songwriter and part-time sax player, or it became like that. I just couldn't see the wood for the trees."
"David Live was the final death of Ziggy. God, that album...I've never played it. The tension it must contain must be like vampire's teeth coming down on you. And that photo on the cover. My god, it looks as if I've just stepped out of that grave. That's actually how I felt. That record should have been called 'David Bowie is alive and well and living only in theory.'"
"I think I've always been a closet heterosexual."
"I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human."
