He was an English singer-songwriter, one of the best-selling artists, and considered one of the most influential in the 20th century.

David Bowie

Gentleness clears the soul, love cleans the mind and makes it free.

I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.

Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It's become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.

The truth is of course is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.

Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.

I'm an instant star. Just add water and stir.

Age doesn't bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys. It's the lack of years left that weighs far heavier on me than the age that I am.

I re-invented my image so many times that I'm in denial that I was originally an overweight Korean woman.

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.

I think in the '70s that there was a general feeling of chaos, a feeling that the idea of the '60s as 'ideal' was a misnomer. Nothing seemed ideal anymore. Everything seemed in-between.

When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

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?

I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity.

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.

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.

All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.

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.

I'm not a prophet or a stone aged man, just a mortal with potential of a superman. I'm living on.

What I like to do is try to make a difference with the work I do.

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.

As an adolescent, I was painfully shy, withdrawn. I didn't really have the nerve to sing my songs on stage, and nobody else was doing them. I decided to do them in disguise so that I didn't have to actually go through the humiliation of going on stage and being myself.

The humanists' replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you'll either save yourself or you'll be immortal. Of course, that's a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there's no ethical progress whatsoever.

Fame itself... doesn't really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.

Art was, seriously, the only thing I'd ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

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

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

That's the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God - so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true... Hell, don't pose me that one.

Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.

It would be my guess that Madonna is not a very happy woman. From my own experience, having gone through persona changes like that, that kind of clawing need to be the center of attention is not a pleasant place to be.

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

I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place.

I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.

Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It's because I'm not quite an atheist and it worries me. There's that little bit that holds on: 'Well, I'm almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.'

Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that - that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.

I'm very good at what I do, and I don't turn my hand to something unless I'm very good at it, frankly.

I feel confident imposing change on myself. It's a lot more fun progressing than looking back. That's why I need to throw curve balls.

I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

My mother was Catholic, my father was Protestant. There was always a debate going on at home - I think in those days we called them arguments - about who was right and who was wrong.

I'm in awe of the universe, but I don't necessarily believe there's an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.

I'm just an individual who doesn't feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I'm working for me.

I'm very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn't think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that's happening to me. I'm rather surprised at who I am, because I'm actually like my dad!

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at.

I cannot with any real integrity perform songs I've done for 25 years. I don't need the money. What I need is to feel that I am not letting myself down as an artist and that I still have something to contribute.

I would dream. I focused all my attention on going to America. The subculture, James Dean, the rock n' roll, the beat writers.

I was born in London 1947, after the war. A real wartime baby. I went to school in Brixton, and then I moved up to Yorkshire, which is in the north of England. I lived on the farms up there.

I've always regretted that I never was able to talk openly with my parents, especially with my father. I've heard and read so many things about my family that I can no longer believe anything; every relative I question has a completely different story from the last.

Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.

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

Everything I read about hitting a midlife crisis was true. I had such a struggle letting go of youthful things and learning how to exist and have enthusiasm while settling into the comfort of an older age.

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

The Americans at heart are a pure and noble people; things to them are in black and white. It's either 'rawk' or it's not. We Brits putter around in the grey area.

There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

I'm responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.

I realized the other day that I've lived in New York longer than I've lived anywhere else. It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange; I never thought I would be.

I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.

I couldn't have written things like 'Low' and 'Heroes,' those particular albums, if it hadn't have been for Berlin and the kind of atmosphere I felt there.

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

The name Zahra was to have been lman's own name at birth, but a senior member of the family changed it to lman at the last minute.

With a suit, always wear big British shoes, the ones with large welts. There's nothing worse than dainty little Italian jobs at the end of the leg line.

I'm well past the age where I'm acceptable. You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

There's a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I'm affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn't want to leave. He likes it very much.

I think Mustique is Duchampian - it will always provide an endless source of delight.

I would drive to gigs in my tiny little Fiat. I would shoot up and down the M1 to play at various places.

I do value the respect I get from my contemporaries, but to have Oasis cover my song, to have Puff Daddy cover a song, to have Goldie come along to my gigs - that's where my ego is at. To have my fellow musicians like what I do, that's very cool.

The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic.

I think Mick Jagger would be astounded and amazed if he realized that to many people he is not a sex symbol, but a mother image.

It is amazing how a new child can refocus one's direction seconds after its birth.

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I'm not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does.

Being a hybrid maker off and on over the years, I'm very comfortable with the idea and have been the subject of quite a few pretty good mash-ups myself.

Since the departure of good old-fashioned entertainers the re-emergence of somebody who wants to be an entertainer has unfortunately become a synonym for camp. I don't think I'm camper than any other person who felt at home on stage, and felt more at home on stage than he did offstage.

I wanted to imbue Ziggy with real flesh and blood and muscle, and it was imperative that I find Ziggy and be him.

However, there's no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

I don't see any boundaries between any of the art forms. I think they all inter-relate completely.

I'm rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it's no longer his... I just see what people make of it.

It amazes me sometimes that even intelligent people will analyze a situation or make a judgement after only recognizing the standard or traditional structure of a piece.

Funk, I don't think I have anything to do with funk. I've never considered myself funky.

I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

I'm not actually a very keen performer. I like putting shows together. I like putting events together. In fact, everything I do is about the conceptualizing and realization of a piece of work, whether it's the recording or the performance side.

For me, often, there's such a cloud of melancholia about knowing I'm going to have to leave my daughter on her own. I don't know what age that is going to be, thank God. It just doubles me up in grief.

And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I'm going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I'm going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan.

I'm not very articulate.

I never really felt like a rock singer or a rock star or whatever.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

But I'm pretty good with collaborative thinking. I work well with other people.

I guess it's flattering that everyone believed I was those characters, but it also is dehumanizing.

Being shoved into the top-40 scene was an unusual experience. It was great I'd become accessible to a huge audience but not terribly fulfilling.

These are all personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's as simple as that.

What I do is I write mainly about very personal and rather lonely feelings, and I explore them in a different way each time. You know, what I do is not terribly intellectual. I'm a pop singer for Christ's sake. As a person, I'm fairly uncomplicated.

I'm wallowing in the whole idea of just being a guy out there with a band, with songs. It's a real enjoyment.

Frankly, I mean, sometimes the interpretations I've seen on some of the songs that I've written are a lot more interesting than the input that I put in.

I was very into making the Big Artistic Statement - it had to be innovative; it had to be cutting edge. I was desperately keen on being original.

I rate Morrissey as one of the best lyricists in Britain. For me, he's up there with Bryan Ferry.

He was an American songwriter, dancer, and one of the most influential and famous artists in the history of entertainment. He is known as the King of Pop.

Michael Jackson

Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons.

Let us dream of tomorrow where we can truly love from the soul, and know love as the ultimate truth at the heart of all creation.

The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work.

If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.

I'm a black American, I am proud of my race. I am proud of who I am. I have a lot of pride and dignity.

The meaning of life is contained in every single expression of life. It is present in the infinity of forms and phenomena that exist in all of creation.

I'm happy to be alive, I'm happy to be who I am.

I'm just like anyone. I cut and I bleed. And I embarass easily.

When I see children, I see the face of God. That's why I love them so much. That's what I see.

Just because it's in print doesn't mean it's the gospel.

People write negatives things, cause they feel that's what sells. Good news to them, doesn't sell.

But I will never stop helping and loving people the way Jesus said to.

My mother's wonderful. To me she's perfection.

I was a veteran, before I was a teenager.

It's a complete lie, why do people buy these papers? It's not the truth I'm here to say. You know, don't judge a person, do not pass judgement, unless you have talked to them one on one. I don't care what the story is, do not judge them because it is a lie.

There were times when I had great times with my brothers, pillow fights and things, but I was, used to always cry from loneliness.

I'm never pleased with anything, I'm a perfectionist, it's part of who I am.

Why can't you share your bed? The most loving thing to do is to share your bed with someone. It's very charming. It's very sweet. It's what the whole world should do.

Because I think every child star suffers through this period because you're not the cute and charming child that you were. You start to grow, and they want to keep you little forever.

Yes, and I had pimples so badly it used to make me so shy. I used not to look at myself. I'd hide my face in the dark, I wouldn't want to look in the mirror and my father teased me and I just hated it and I cried everyday.

I have a skin disorder that destroys the pigmentation of my skin, it's something that I cannot help, OK?

Please keep an open mind and let me have my day in court.

I just wish I could understand my father.

I don't understand why the press is so interested in speculating about my appearance, anyway. What does my face have to do with my music or my dancing?

Me and Janet really are two different people.

Before I would hurt a child, I would slit my wrists.

The Bee Gees who are brilliant, I just love great music.

Everyone who knows me will know the truth, which is that my children come first in my life and that I would never harm any child.

Children show me in their playful smiles the divine in everyone. This simple goodness shines straight from their hearts and only asks to be loved.

Well, especially now I come to realize - and then - I would do my schooling which was three hours with a tutor and right after that I would go to the recording studio and record, and I'd record for hours and hours until it's time to go to sleep.

Everything that I love is behind those gates. We have elephants, and giraffes, and crocodiles, and every kind of tigers and lions. And - and we have bus loads of kids, who don't get to see those things. They come up sick children, and enjoy it.

Because parents have power over children. They feel they have to do what their parents say. But the love of money is the root of all evil. And this is a sweet child. And to see him turn like this, this isn't him. This is not him.

They did it to try and belittle me, to try and to take away my pride. But I went through the whole system with them. And at the end, I - I wanted the public to know that I was okay, even though I was hurting.

I've helped many, many, many children, thousands of children, cancer kids, leukemia kids.

I rememeber one time we were getting ready to go to South America and everything was packed up and in the car ready to go and I hid and I was crying because I really did not want to go, I wanted to play. I did not want to go.

And I remember going to the record studio and there was a park across the street and I'd see all the children playing and I would cry because it would make me sad that I would have to work instead.

I will say again that I have never, and would never, harm a child. It sickens me that people have written untrue things about me.

You know, let's put it this way, if all the people in Hollywood who have had plastic surgery, if they went on vacation, there wouldn't be a person left in town.

Because I wanted to have a place that I could create everything that I that I never had as a child. So, you see rides. You see animals. There's a movie theater.

Well, you don't get to do things that other children get to do, having friends and slumber parties and buddies. There were none of that for me. I didn't have friends when I was little. My brothers were my friends.

Yeah, Wacko Jacko, where did that come from? Some English tabloid. I have a heart and I have feelings. I feel that when you do that to me. It's not nice.

Well Brooke, I've always liked her, and when I was little I used to stay with Diana Ross, me and my brothers stayed with her for years and I never said, but I always had a crush on her.

Elizabeth Taylor is gorgeous, beautiful, and she still is today, I'm crazy about her.

I love my family very much. I wish I could see them a little more often than I do. But we understand because we're a show business family and we all work.

In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.

We have to heal our wounded world. The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and their environment.

When they say the sky's the limit to me that's really true.

To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?

People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.

All of us are products of our childhood.

Hope is such a beautiful word, but it often seems very fragile. Life is still being needlessly hurt and destroyed.

In their innocence, very young children know themselves to be light and love. If we will allow them, they can teach us to see ourselves the same way.

To give someone a piece of your heart, is worth more than all the wealth in the world.

Sometimes the heart is so heavy that we turn away from it and forget that its throbbing is the wisest message of life, a wordless message that says, "Live, be, move, rejoice, you are alive!" Without the heart's wise rhythm, we could not exist.

A star can never die. It just turns into a smile and melts back into the cosmic music, the dance of life.

When children listen to music, they don't just listen. They melt into the melody and flow with the rhythm. Something inside starts to unfold its wings - soon the child and the music are one.

When I step out on stage in front of thousands of people, I don't feel that I'm being brave. It can take much more courage to express true feelings to one person. [...] In spite of the risks, the courage to be honest and intimate opens the way to self-discovery. It offers what we all want, the promise of love.

I love to read. I wish I could advise more people to read. There’s a whole new world in books. If you can’t afford to travel, you travel mentally through reading. You can see anything and go any place you want to in reading.

But for me the sweetest contact with God has no form. I close my eyes, look within, and enter a deep soft silence. The infinity of God's creation embraces me.

And that's what innocence is. It's simple and trusting like a child, not judgmental and committed to one narrow point of view. If you are locked into a pattern of thinking and responding, your creativity gets blocked. You miss the freshness and magic of the moment. Learn to be innocent again, and that freshness never fades.

I'm just like anyone. I cut and I bleed and I embarass easily.

I'm going to search for my star until I find it. It's hidden in the drawer of innocence, wrapped in a scarf of wonder.

Look beyond yourself.

They say that parenting is like dancing. You take one step, your child takes another.

Before you judge me, try hard to love me, look within your heart. Then ask, have you seen my childhood?

He was a British songwriter and artist. He was part of the Beatles band, but he decided to independently compose music, poetry, and drawings.

John Lennon

I get by with a little help from my friends.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.

Love is the flower you've got to let grow.

Love is the answer, and you know that for sure; Love is a flower, you've got to let it grow.

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one.

We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can't just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it's going to get on by itself. You've got to keep watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture it.

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?

Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.

I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I've always been a freak. So I've been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I'm one of those people.

My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'.

I believe time wounds all heels.

If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

You don't need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

Everything is clearer when you're in love.

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship.

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

All you need is love.

All we are saying is give peace a chance.

Studying quotes to truly understand their meaning

David Bowie

Michael Jackson

John Lennon

Billie Eilish

Eminem

Bob Dylan

Bob Marley

Lady Gaga

Beyonce

Madonna

Prince

Kurt Cobain

Britney Spears

Freddie Mercury

Elvis Presley

Jimi Hendrix

Taylor Swift

Tupac Shakur

Bon Jovi

Larry June

Young Dolph

Gunna

Jose Feliciano

Jay-Z

Stevie Wonder

Hank Williams

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