Creativity Quote by David Bowie

Bowie’s sentence is a quiet flex disguised as humility: the kind of line that sounds like note-taking but carries an entire method. He’s not talking about “influences” in the fanboy sense. He’s describing a deliberate audit of talent, a curated jury of the greats he keeps in his head. “Went through” suggests process, not inspiration-by-lightning-bolt. Bowie is building a standard he intends to meet, or steal from, or triangulate against.

The triad - “bright, intelligent, virtuosic” - is telling. “Virtuosic” is the obvious musician’s compliment, but he leads with cognition. For Bowie, technique matters, but the deeper fetish is mental velocity: players who think fast, who make choices that imply a worldview. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the romantic myth of rock as pure feeling. Bowie’s always been the pop star who treats emotion like a material you can engineer.

Contextually, this is Bowie at his most revealing: the artist as magpie and strategist, assembling collaborators and reference points the way he assembled personas. It’s the same impulse that powered his Berlin-era reinvention, his flirtations with soul and electronic music, his late-career return with Blackstar. He isn’t confessing insecurity; he’s describing quality control. Admiration becomes a filtering system: if you want to evolve without turning into a parody of yourself, you keep the brightest minds in the room - even when the room is your own memory.