David Bowie: Finding Fame (2019 TV Movie)

David Bowie: Self

Quotes 

• David Bowie : I never asked Jesus for a thing. No. It was always on my own initiative.

• David Bowie : I think there's a passion for most people who have an iota of, sort of, curiosity about escape and get out and try and find who one is.

• [first lines] 

  David Bowie : Once upon a time, your father, my father, everybody's father, I presume, wanted a good job, with a good income, to secure their family life. A role in society. And that's where it ended, but, now people want to be an individual and I think there's a lot of searching to find the individual within oneself.

• David Bowie : So much of what any teenager or young person writes comes from a sense of uniqueness.

• David Bowie : You find yourself in the middle of two worlds. There's the extreme values of people who grow up in the countryside and the very *urban* feel of the city. In suburbia, you're given the impression that nothing culturally belongs to you. That you are sort of in this wasteland.

• David Bowie : Other than just rock music, there's always been a history of the rebel, of not being drawn to the tyranny of the mainstream.

• David Bowie : I really am open to influence and new ideas and old ideas, as well. I don't put a block on things.

• David Bowie : I was one of the first kids in Britain to have a Velvet Underground album. I know that for a fact; because, somebody had brought me back a demo copy of it before it was even released in America. The Underground were, I thought, a most incredible sound that was this sort of mixture of rock and avant-garde. And the combination was so brutal.

• David Bowie : The idea of writing some short stories, I think that was quite novel at the time. Excuse the pun. I was quite satisfied with the way things were going.

• David Bowie : To me, the Velvet Underground represented the wild side of existentialist America, the underbelly of American culture. That was everything that I thought we should have in England. But, of course, being filtered through this British system, it came out more vaudeville.

• David Bowie : I think the isolation of the film "2001" made it so very obvious when I wrote the song "Space Oddity." Because, for the first time, I really felt a sense of how you could write as an isolationist.

• David Bowie : Somehow, I knew that what I was doing was important. Taking elements from areas that really shouldn't sit comfortably with each other.

• David Bowie : Everything hurts me, very much. I'm very sensitive. But, I put myself in that position, so, that's - what I'm in for, isn't it?

• David Bowie : I thought, "Well, gee, I am Major Tom. Here I am in my own cosmic space and nobody can possibly understand what its like to be out here on this umbilical cord attached to my craft.

• David Bowie : I have always been a very curious and enthusiastic person. I just had to accept that I was a person with a very short attention span who moved from one thing to another quite rapidly. Then I got bored with the other.

• David Bowie : [referring to "Space Oddity"]  I related it to myself a lot more than anything I'd ever written up till then. There was something about it that touched areas of my fears about my own insecurities socially and maybe emotionally. This feeling of isolation I had ever since I was a kid was really starting to manifest itself.

• David Bowie : I think I'd realized that the transitory nature of life was something that we all had to deal with.

• David Bowie : Insanity was something that I was terribly fearful of. But, I felt that I was the lucky one; because, as long as I could put those psychological excesses into my music, then I could always be throwing it off.

• David Bowie : I think I was getting nearer to what I wanted to do, which is to create this alternative world. Which is what I ultimately ended up doing with the Ziggy thing.

• David Bowie : [referring to his half-brother]  Terry probably gave me the greatest education I could have ever had. I mean he just introduced me to the outside things. And I guess Terry had shown me that there's always been a history of the outside, of the rebel, of not being in the center, not being drawn to the tyranny of the mainstream.

• David Bowie : God came to me and he said "Let there be Ziggy." And I just saw the world in another kind of fashion. And it was about pushing together all the pieces and all the things that fascinated me, culturally. A hybrid of everything I liked - just playing around with the idea of rock-n-roll.

• [last lines] 

  David Bowie : To make the kind of breakthrough I needed, I had to put on a few trappings, in the beginning. And I think now, I will just be David Bowie - period. I've got massive plans for the future.

• David Bowie : The artist is strictly a figment of people's imagination. I really believe that. We are the original false prophets. We are the gods. We want it all. You know, we want all the adulation and the people to read the lyrics and everything - just to play the game. We don't exist.

• David Bowie : I was trying to be a one-man revolution.

  [laughs]