David Bowie: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

by David Bowie

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

BOWIE: I’m not sure whether it is me changing my mind, or whether I lie a lot. It’s somewhere between the two. I don’t exactly lie, I change my mind all the time. People are always throwing things at me that I’ve said and I say that I didn’t mean anything. You can’t stand still on one point for your entire life.

I gave too much of my time and energy to another person and they did the same to me and we started burning out against each other. And that is what is termed love … that we decide to put all our values on another person. It’s like two pedestals, each wanting to be the other pedestal.

The love that you see, among people who say, “We’re in love,” it’s nice to look at … but wanting not to be alone, wanting to have a person there that they relate to for a few years is not often the love that carries on throughout the lives of those people. There is another word. I’m not sure whether it is a word. Love is every type of relationship that you think of … I’m sure it means relationship, every type of relationship that you can think of.

BURROUGHS: Your lyrics are quite perceptive. BOWIE: They’re a bit middle class, but that’s all right, ’cause I’m middle class.

Libraries of video cassettes should be developed to their fullest during the interim.

it’s platonic. But there is a romance in it, I guess, inasmuch as it’s hard for two people to feel totally at ease in each other’s company for that period of time and not expect too much from each other. Always being prepared to be there if the other one needs someone, you know? There’s not many people you find in life that you can do that with, or feel that way with.

the extreme, authentic strangeness of David Bowie.

“It’s a good exhibition—of somebody literally falling apart in front of you.

My main preoccupation throughout everything I’ve ever done has been the concept of what I was writing about. And the problem of how it should be presented was the priority. It was never ‘I want to be alone,’ or any of that shit.”

BUST: What do you think makes relationships between men and women work? BOWIE: Complete and absolute generosity with the duvet. The realization that the differences between you will be the key to love, as they will become more apparent as the relationship grows. These are the things to be treasured above all else. The similarities will take care of themselves.

It was Nic Roeg’s intention to show that Newton’s only means of collecting and sifting data was channel hopping. This, to me, intimates that he had at least some interest in what was going on around him. At that point I’m not sure that I had quite the same passion for “reality” as he. My preferred viewing was the “snow” on the spare channel. My “truth” was somewhere between extraterrestrial magi and a few good grams.