Happy birthday, David Bowie! Here are some quotes from the musician:

“I’m a born librarian with a sex drive.”

“I’m a real self-educated kind of guy. I read voraciously. Every book I ever bought, I have. I can’t throw it away. It’s physically impossible to leave my hand! Some of them are in warehouses. I’ve got a library [where] I keep the ones I really, really like. I look around my library some nights and I do these terrible things to myself—I count up the books and think how long I might have to live, and think, ‘Fuck, I can’t read two-thirds of these books.’ It overwhelms me with sadness.”

“Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.”

“I’m terribly intuitive—I always thought I was intellectual about what I do, but I’ve come to the realization that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing half the time, that the majority of the stuff that I do is totally intuitive, totally about where I am physically and mentally at any moment in time and I have a far harder time than anybody else explaining it and analyzing it. That’s the territory of the artist anyway: to be quite at sea with what he does…”

“I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human. I felt very puny as a human. I thought, ‘Fuck that. I want to be a superhuman.'”

“Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all. I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas.”

“People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture they were brought up in. People have attention spans of five seconds and as much depth as a glass of water.”

“We create so many circles on this straight line we’re told we’re traveling. The truth, of course, is that there is no journey. We are arriving and departing all at the same time.”

“Music has given me over 40 years of extraordinary experiences. I can’t say that life’s pains or more tragic episodes have been diminished because of it. But it’s allowed me so many moments of companionship when I’ve been lonely and a sublime means of communication when I wanted to touch people. It’s been both my doorway of perception and the house that I live in. I only hope that it embraces you with the same lusty life force that it graciously offered me.”