Bowie: "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."

Bowie: "Even though I was very shy, I found I could get onstage if I had a new identity."

Bowie: "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."

Bowie: "It would be positively boring if minds were in tune."

Bowie: "A lot of people that I know are bugged with the idea that they have got to have an audience, or they have got to be liked. I think the more that you fall into that trap it makes your own life harder to come to terms with, because an audience appreciation is only going to be periodic at the best of times."

Bowie: "All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings."

Bowie: "Perhaps if we didn’t dwell on absolutes and what we should be doing, we might be able to re-establish a whole new philosophical understanding of why we’re on the planet."

Bowie: "Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything."

Bowie: "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."

Bowie: "Offstage I'm a robot. Onstage I achieve emotion. It's probably why I prefer dressing up as Ziggy to being David."

Bowie: "It always felt like you were trying too hard to look like the audience or something. That whole thing about the artistic integrity, which, of course, I've never bought into - with any artist. It's just not a real thing."

Bowie: "When I'm stuck for a closing to a lyric, I will drag out my last resort: overwhelming illogic."

Bowie: "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."

Bowie: "I'm not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment."

Bowie: "If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting."

Bowie: "Everything we look at and choose is some way of expressing how we want to be perceived."

Bowie: “I’ve always been a very curious and enthusiastic person from when I was a teenager. It really wasn't up to me to try and identify exactly what that meant. I just had to accept that I was a person with a very short attention span who would move from one thing to another quite rapidly when I got bored with the other. I became comfortable with that and didn't try to identify myself or try and ask myself who I was. The less questioning I did about myself as to who I was, the more comfortable I felt. So now I have absolutely no knowledge of who I am, and I'm extremely happy."

Bowie: "The end comes when the infinites arrive."

Bowie: "You can't put down anybody. You can just try and understand. The emphasis shouldn't be on revolution, it should be on communication. Because it's just going to get more uptight. The more the revolution goes on, and there will be a civil war sooner or later."

Bowie: "I've always seemed to collect personalities, ideas. I have a hodge-podge philosophy."

Bowie: "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."

Bowie: "Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have."

Bowie: "If I never wake again, I certainly will have lived while I was alive."

Bowie: "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."

Bowie: "Style is about the choices you make to create the aspects of civilization that you wish to uphold."

Bowie: "It took me a long time to reach the bottom and it went through various stages. I went from drugs into an alcohol stage. For a while, one feels, 'Ah, I've kicked drugs,' but what I discovered was I had another addiction instead."

Bowie: "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?"

Bowie: "Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming."

Bowie: "I could never, ever talk to my father. I really loved him, but we couldn't talk about anything together. There was this really British thing that being even remotely emotional was absolutely verboten."

Bowie: "Comfort comes into your house first as guest, then as a host, then finally as the master."

[On doing acid]

Bowie: “I did three times. It was very colorful, but I thought my own imagination was already richer. Naturally. And more meaningful to me. Acid only gives people a link with their own imagery. I already had it. It was nothing new to me. It just sort of made a lot of fancy colors. Flashy lights and things. 'Oh, look. I see God in the window.' So what? I never needed acid to make music, either."