Creativity Quote by David Bowie

Bowie collapses the heroic arc of self-discovery into a single, blinking moment: no road, no “before” and “after,” just perpetual motion. The line sounds like a Zen koan delivered in a space-age croon, but its bite is practical. Pop culture sells the journey because it’s marketable: the comeback, the reinvention, the “new era.” Bowie, who practically wrote the manual on reinvention, undercuts that mythology from the inside. He’s admitting the trick while still performing it.

The phrasing matters. “The truth is of course is” trips over itself, a little stutter that mimics a mind catching itself mid-narrative. The redundancy feels intentional, like he’s exposing the seams of certainty. Then comes the pivot: “there is no journey.” Not nihilism, more like a refusal to grant time the clean geometry we crave. “Arriving and departing” isn’t just travel language; it’s identity language. Every time you “arrive” as one version of yourself, you’re already leaving another behind. The present tense turns it into a permanent condition, not a phase.

Contextually, this is Bowie’s lifelong argument with linear biography. Ziggy dies so Bowie can live; Bowie “returns” so he can vanish again. Underneath the glamour is an ethics of attention: stop treating your life like a plotline that will eventually make sense. You’re not en route to meaning. You’re in it, shedding it, replacing it, all at once.