Standing by the Wall: Miscellaneous Debris

The Quotable David Bowie (Work In Progress)


David Bowie | Music | Sex | Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fascism | Drugs | More...


David Bowie

"I change my mind a lot. I usually don't agree with what I say very much. I'm an awful liar." - 1974

"I've been the male equivalent of the dumb blonde for a few years, and I was beginning to despair of people accepting me for my music. It may be fine for a male model to be told he's a great looking guy, but that doesn't help a singer much, especially now that the pretty boy personality cult seems to be on the way out." - 1969

"Offstage I'm a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer being Ziggy to David." - 1972

"I'm the perfect example of the victim of technology. I think it's disastrous." - 1977

"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." - 1983

"I don't seriously think I could offer anybody else any advice at all. It would be about as profound as Alfred E. Neuman." - 1980

"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." -1983

"I was convinced I wasn't worth very much. I had enormous self-image, problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing... I thought I didn't need to exist. I really felt so utterly inadequate. I thought the work was the only thing of value. Now I'm starting to quite like me." - 1997

"At the moment, David seems to be the sort of person much needed in pop; full of original thought, a willingness to work, a hatred of the hard drug scene and class distinction in music, and common sense enough not to let the fame and adulation surely coming his way, turn his head." - Gordon Coxhill, New Musical Express, 1969


Music

"I'm not a musician." - 1972

"I don't like rock 'n' roll very much." - 1975

"I suppose most of [my audience] are as confused about things as I am. I console them in their confusion, they're not alone. I've stopped analyzing it. Cataloguing confusion is courting suicide". - 1972

"I’m never gonna try and play black music because I’m white. Singularly white!" - 1972

"My commitment has certainly never been in rock 'n' roll. I've made no secret of that. I was just a hack painter who wanted to find a new medium to work in, frankly, and rock 'n' roll looked like a very good vehicle." - 1977

"I'm not what I'm supposed to be. What are people buying? I adopted Ziggy onstage and now I feel more and more like this monster and less and less like David Bowie." - 1972

"I thought that [Ziggy Stardust persona] was a grand kitsch painting. The whole guy. Then that fucker would not leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to sour." - 1977

"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.'" - 1977

"When I delivered Low, I got a telegram offering to pay for me to go back to Sigma Sound in Philadelphia to do another Young Americans." - 1993

"All I know is the input of the album ["Heroes"]... Eno is the same. Neither of us understands on a linear level what the thing's about, but we get a damned good impression of information coming off those two albums that seems very strong, and that was not very intentional." - 1977

"[Sound and Vision] was just the idea of getting out of America, that depressing era I was going through. I was going through dreadful times. It was wanting to be put in a little cold room with omnipotent blue on the walls and blinds on the windows." - 1978

A few thoughts on Major Tom:
"Here we had the great blast of American technological know-how shoving this guy up into space and once he gets there he's not quite sure why he's there. And that's where I left him. Now we've found out that he's under some kind of realisation that the whole process that got him up there had decayed, was born out of decay; it has decayed him and he's in the process of decaying. But he wishes to return to the nice, round womb, the earth, from whence he started... It really is an ode to childhood, if you like, a popular nursery rhyme. It's about space men becoming junkies." - 1980


Sex

"I'm gay and always have been, even when I was David Jones." - 1972

"My sexual nature is irrelevant. I'm an actor, I play roles, fragments of myself." - 1972

"Girls are always presuming that I've kept my heterosexual virginity for some reason. So I've had all these girls try to get me over to the other side again: 'C'mon, David, it isn't all that bad. I'll show you.' Or, better yet, 'We'll show you.' I always play dumb." - 1976

"I've always been very chauvinistic, even in my boy-obsessed days. But I was always a gentleman. I always treated my boys like real ladies. Always escorted them properly and, in fact, I suppose if I were a lot older - like 40 or 50 - I'd be a wonderful sugar daddy to some little queen down in Kensington. I'd have a houseboy named Richard to order around." - 1976

"I think I've always been a closet heterosexual." - 199?


Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fascism

"I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader. After all, fascism is really nationalism." -1976

"I think the morals should be straightened up for a start. They're disgusting." - 1975

"I believe very strongly in fascism... People have always responded with greater efficiency under a regimental leadership. A liberal wastes time saying, 'Well, now, what ideas have you got?' Show them what to do, for God's sake. If you don't, nothing will get done. I can't stand people just hanging about." - 1976

"Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars." - 1976

"There will be a political figure in the not too distant future who'll sweep this part of the world like early rock 'n' roll did. You probably hope I'm not right. But I am. My predictions are very accurate. Always." - 1975

"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." - 1975

"I have made my two or three glib, theatrical observations on English society and the only thing I can now counter with is to state that I am NOT a facist. I'm apolitical." - 1977

"That didn't happened. THAT DID NOT HAPPEN. I waved. I just WAVED. Believe me. On the life of my child, I waved. And the bastard caught me. In MID-WAVE, man." - 1977

"I was in the depths of mythology. I had found King Arthur... I mean, this whole racist thing which came up, quite inevitably and rightly, but - and I know this sounds terribly naive - but none of that had actually occurred to me, inasmuch as I'd been working and still do work with black musicians for the past six or seven years. And we'd all talk about it together - about the Authurian period, about the magical side of the whole Nazi campaign, and about the mythology involved." - 1980

"[In Berlin] I was in a situation where I was meeting young people of my age whose fathers had actually been SS men, That was a good way to be woken up out of that particular dilemma... yeah, I came crashing down to earth when I got back to Europe." - 1980


Drugs

"Pulling myself back out of that was not quick, it was a good two-to three year process. There was a flashback effect... While I was living in Berlin, I would have days where things were moving in the room - and this was when I was totally straight." - 1983

"Have you ever tried to conduct a relationship on cocaine? I mean, what you do to the other person is absolutely foul. So few drugs don't have an effect on the other person. Coffee so far seems to be OK... I've not heard of many couples that were split apart by one's addiction to coffee." - 199?

"I remember reading about the effects of vast amounts of amphetamines and cocaine, and the holes they leave in your brain. They specified the amounts you had to take to produce sizable holes, amounts I far exceeded. I thought, 'Oh God, what the hell's going on up there?'" - 1997

"I would say a lot of the time I spent in America in the '70s is really hard to remember, in a way that I've not seen happen to too many other artists... I listen to Station To Station as a piece of work by an entirely different person." - 1997


More...

"The only thing that I really adored about Lennon's writing was his use of the pun, which was exceedingly good. I don't think anyone has ever bettered Lennon's use of the pun, I played on it more; Lennon would throw it away in one line, I tend to build a song upon it. I treat my puns a lot more seriously." - 1972

"I was thinking about having [Mike Garson] back in the band, and the thing that really clinched it was hearing that he was no longer a Scientologist." - 1997

"I really think I should have done more for gnomes. I always feel a bit guilty that I just put my feet into the water, and never sort of dived into the deep end. I really could have produced a new sensibility for the garden gnome in Britain. Gnomes should have been explored more deeply." - 2000


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