“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.”

Unlike your average rock god, Bowie was not stuck up about embracing his imitators—he loved it when the future legends ripped him off, because that was the realest flattery for the original rip-off king.

The ideal collision of vulgarity and high-mindedness.”

“I blew my nose one day and half my brains came out.”

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.

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.

It was like that scene in “Five Years”—getting the news, wandering in search of some kind of human connection and finding

Prince dropped Purple Rain, an album that consummated everything Let’s Dance promised, though his guitar sounded more like Scary Monsters—Prince

“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 Dene