“I’ve met all the women, and I’ll tell you one thing, I’m more woman than any of ’em. I’m a real woman, because I have love, dependability, I’m good, kind, gentle, and I’ve the power to give real love. Why else would you think that such a strong man as David Bowie would be close to me? He’s a real man, and I’m a real woman. Just like Catherine

Bowie’s space songs were always about isolation and his desire to overcome it.

“You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”

Pop stardom, the way he defined it, means you keep feeling fascination for the now sound right up to the moment—you don’t settle for what you did yesterday. You tune in to the pop trash all over the radio dial for any ideas worth scavenging.

again. As with so many Bowie fans, what he learned from the master was how to turn loneliness into a grand theatrical gesture—how to turn your loneliness into a work of art.

The mystery of whether Thomas Pynchon heard “Space Oddity” before writing the last hundred pages of Gravity’s Rainbow is one of those questions I never stop asking myself.

Bowie was all about eroticizing what you don’t know for sure.

The ideal collision of vulgarity and high-mindedness.”

it in unexpected places. Suddenly you’re surrounded by all these people going through the same shock and grief you feel, all of our heads hurting like a warehouse. Never thought I’d need so many people.