David Bowie

“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.”

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

“I don't profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.”

“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.”

“My son's full real name is Duncan Zowie Haywood. As a toddler, he was called by his second name Zowie. But it was such an identifiable name during the Seventies that if I called him loudly i...”

“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 wor...”

“I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I'm a writer... I write.”

“When I heard Little Richard, I mean, it just set my world on fire.”

“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...”

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

“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,...”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's amazing: I am a New Yorker. It's strange; I never thought I would be.”

“I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt - you know, I had to go out and...”

“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.”

“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 felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.”

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

“I don't like to read things that people write about me. I'd rather read what kids have to say about me because it's not their profession to do that.”