Top 100 Amanda Palmer Quotes
#1. There's a huge cloud of shame around art and business being seen as bedfellows.
Amanda Palmer
#2. I still get laughed at but it doesn't bother me,
I'm just so glad to hear laughter around me.
Amanda Palmer
#3. People had this idea about becoming rock stars packing stadiums instead of having the goal of becoming what musicians used to be in terms of how they would perform and connect people.
Amanda Palmer
#4. We all got used to living in the cloud of unknowing.
Amanda Palmer
#5. I suppose I'm happy to sell my time and energy, but I'm not happy to sell my initial creative time.
Amanda Palmer
#6. Art is food for the soul, and an artistic climate is a healthy climate because it breeds empathy.
Amanda Palmer
#7. I crave intimacy to the same burning degree that I detest commitment.
Amanda Palmer
#8. I suffer mornings most of all
I feel so powerless and small
By ten o'clock I'm back in bed
Fighting the jury in my head
Amanda Palmer
#9. Quit the bitching on your blog
And stop pretending art is hard.
Just limit yourself to three chords
And do not practice daily.
You'll minimize some stranger's sadness
With a piece of wood and plastic.
Holy fuck it's so fantastic,
Playing ukulele.
Amanda Palmer
#10. I see everybody arguing about what the value of music should be instead of what I think the bigger conversation is, which is that music has value, it's subjective and we're moving to a new era where the audience is taking more responsibility for supporting artists at whatever level.
Amanda Palmer
#11. You get the feeling that on a lot of days the audience for most music would kind of rather not be faced with the artist, especially because we've been educated to think that the artist are these special creatures are otherwordly and aren't like us.
Amanda Palmer
#12. Twitter fascinates me because it's real. It feels kind of unreal, but it makes very real things happen.
Amanda Palmer
#13. What's important is that I absorb, listen, talk, connect, help, and share. Constantly.
Amanda Palmer
#14. When you examine the genesis of great works of art, successful start-ups, and revolutionary shifts in politics, you can always trace back a history of monetary and nonmonetary exchange, the hidden patrons and underlying favors.
Amanda Palmer
#15. It's hard to work on an assembly line of broken hearts Not supposed to fix them, only strip and sell the parts
Amanda Palmer
#16. We've been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE DOING. You
Amanda Palmer
#17. When you trust people to help you, they often do.
Amanda Palmer
#18. Everybody out there is winging it to some degree, of this we can be pretty sure.
Amanda Palmer
#19. Every album is just a greatest hits of whatever songs are on a pile when I go in to make a record.
Amanda Palmer
#20. You are an artist when you make someone feel something deep and unexpected.
Amanda Palmer
#22. I'm a massive fan of David Lynch and 'Twin Peaks.'
Amanda Palmer
#24. I'm bisexual, but it's not the sort of thing I spent a lot of time thinking about ... I've slept with girls; I've slept with guys, so I guess that's what they call it! I'm not anti trying to use language to simplify our lives.
Amanda Palmer
#25. For most of human history, musicians, artists, they've been part of the community - connectors and openers, not untouchable stars.
Amanda Palmer
#26. The perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but more important, to ask without shame.
Amanda Palmer
#27. My blog readership grew steadily as I started to dump more of my inner self onto the page. I
Amanda Palmer
#29. In truth, feeling love from a distance is just lonely. Maybe even worse than no love at all, because it feels so unnatural.
Amanda Palmer
#30. It's hard enough to give fearlessly, and it's even harder to receive fearlessly.
But within that exchange lies the hardest thing of all:
To ask. Without shame.
And to accept the help that people offer.
Not to force them.
Just to let them.
Amanda Palmer
#31. Asking is, in itself, the fundamental building block of any relationship.
Amanda Palmer
#32. In other words, let's give our young women the right weapons to fight with as they charge naked into battle, instead of ordering them to get back in the house and put some goddamn clothes on.
Amanda Palmer
#33. It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!
Amanda Palmer
#34. He'd believed for a long time, deep down, that people didn't actually fall in love. That they were all faking it.
Amanda Palmer
#35. Maybe we should stop asking how do we get people to pay for music, and start asking how do we let them pay for music? from Ted Talk
Amanda Palmer
#36. This impulse to connect the dots - and to share what you've connected - is the urge that makes you an artist. If
Amanda Palmer
#37. The pattern's laid out on the bed
With dozens of colors of thread
But you've got the needle
I guess that's the point in the end
Amanda Palmer
#38. And once I'd unloaded all my teenage pain on him, he knew the way to win my trust. He never told me what to do. Instead, he told me stories.
Amanda Palmer
#39. Before I saw your talk, I always thought of street performers as beggars.
Amanda Palmer
#40. In some way, my fundamental feeling about music is that it's impossible to put a price tag on it. Human beings made music before they made a lot of other things, including tools.
Amanda Palmer
#41. When you connect with people, they want to help you.
Amanda Palmer
#42. And another local journalist wrote an op-ed wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far.
Wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far?
To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of understanding.
Amanda Palmer
#43. It's about finding your people, your listeners, your readers, and making art for and with them. Not for the masses, not for the critics, but for your ever-widening circle of friends. It
Amanda Palmer
#44. I've always been a creative workaholic. I have never had a period of my life where I didn't have at least half a dozen projects going on at once.
Amanda Palmer
#45. I am not afraid.
fuck safety.
i rock on purpose ALL THE TIME
Amanda Palmer
#46. The field of asking is fundamentally improvisational. It thrives not in the creation of rules and etiquette but in the smashing of that etiquette.
Which is to say: there are no rules.
Or, rather, there are plenty of rules, but they ask, on bended knees, to be broken.
Amanda Palmer
#47. People can understand a price tag no matter what it's stuck on. But they couldn't understand the messier exchange of asking and giving: the gift that stays in motion.
Amanda Palmer
#48. There's no blueprint; getting married doesn't make you boring, having kids doesn't make you boring, having money doesn't necessarily have to make you boring.
Amanda Palmer
#49. Asking for help with shame says:
You have the power over me.
Asking with condescension says:
I have the power over you.
But asking for help with gratitude says:
We have the power to help each other.
Amanda Palmer
#50. When we really see each other, we want to help each other.
Amanda Palmer
#51. I think a good role model has to be sexy. Real, empowered, self-possessed women are sexy. When you're really in control of your choices, your mood, your body, and your opinions, people find you sexy.
Amanda Palmer
#52. Nothing is crueller than children who come from good homes.
Amanda Palmer
#53. I'd actually say that every musician is a human being, and that not everybody likes being social. But with music, there are all these ingredients to the business that have nothing to do with writing songs or playing an instrument.
Amanda Palmer
#54. If your writing is good, if it resonates, if it connects the dots for anybody out there, the lovers will come, the haters will come, support will come - sometimes in the form of money, sometimes in the form of something less expected - and it balances.
Amanda Palmer
#55. When you're an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it.
Amanda Palmer
#57. There was a dance that everyone was doing that was heavily skewed with the power in one direction, but the dance was basically working, and then the dance got really disrupted with the first wave of feminism, and nobody found their footing yet - not the guys, not the women.
Amanda Palmer
#58. We can only connect the dots we collect, which makes everything you write about you ... your connections are the thread that you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.
Amanda Palmer
#59. If we can repair things emotionally, a lot of other things would follow.
Amanda Palmer
#60. I think performance art comes from a simple place of wanting to express things beyond just sound.
Amanda Palmer
#61. The impulse to connect the dots - and to share what you've connected - is the urge that makes you an artist
Amanda Palmer
#63. In both the art and the business worlds, the difference between the amateurs and the professionals is simple: The professionals know they're winging it. The amateurs pretend they're not.
Amanda Palmer
#64. Anthony once told me: It isn't what you say to people, it's more important what you do with them. It's less important what you do with them than the way you're with them.
Amanda Palmer
#65. I was just a very dark kid. My family was complicated.
Amanda Palmer
#66. I have used Twitter for so many things, from places to stay, places to go, things to do, things I need, medical advice, you name it. Especially when I'm on tour, it really feels like I'm being taken care of by half a million people. It is like having a mom.
Amanda Palmer
#67. We were far more interested in serving our slowly growing, tight-knit community of weirdos than we were in topping the charts.
Amanda Palmer
#69. If you're willing to take risks, Twitter is a vast amusement park of interesting life possibilities.
Amanda Palmer
#70. How do we create a world in which people don't think of art just as a product, but as a relationship?
Amanda Palmer
#71. It was essential to feel thankful for the few who stopped to watch or listen, instead of wasting energy on resenting the majority who passed me by.
Amanda Palmer
#72. You know what's really cool? Wake up every morning, decide what you feel like doing, and do it.
Amanda Palmer
#73. As I moved through my life as a statue and later as a musician, I started to understand. There's a difference between wanting to be looked at and wanting to be seen.
Amanda Palmer
#74. Those who ask without fear learn to say two things, with or without words, to those they are facing: I deserve to ask and You are welcome to say no. Because the ask that is conditional cannot be a gift.
Amanda Palmer
#75. I don't feel at home in New Orleans. I don't feel at home in Austin or L.A. And I just felt immediately at home in northern Australia.
Amanda Palmer
#76. Those who can ask without shame are viewing themselves in collaboration with - rather than in competition with - the world.
Amanda Palmer
#77. Everyone I know shares toothbrushes. Everyone I know sleeps on each other's floor. Everyone I know uses what they've got and shares what they've got.
Amanda Palmer
#78. Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.
Amanda Palmer
#79. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.
Amanda Palmer
#80. I get so many ideas for songs, but I'm so seldom disciplined enough to sit down and crank them out.
Amanda Palmer
#81. I firmly believe in music being as free as possible. Unlocked. Shared and spread. In order for artists to survive and create, their audiences need to step up and directly support them.
Amanda Palmer
#82. Eat the pain. Send it back into the void as love.
Amanda Palmer
#83. Almost every important human encounter boils down to the act, and the art, of asking.
Amanda Palmer
#84. Limitations can expand, rather than shrink, the creative flow.
Amanda Palmer
#86. I'm still trying to express my truth, my place in the world, my belief.
Amanda Palmer
#87. The stage show is, in some sense, highly theatrical. It's definitely not just a band in jeans playing rock and roll.
Amanda Palmer
#88. If you stuck me in a room and gave me art-making tools but told me no one would ever see the results, I don't think I'd have much desire to make art. What I do comes from a deep desire to be seen and to see others.
Amanda Palmer
#89. There's nothing more threatening than a powerful woman, and there's nothing more threatening to the current order of things than women powerfully owning their own narrative. It's so threatening to people, to women as well, and it's threatening the order of things.
Amanda Palmer
#90. I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing - you're falling into the audience and you're trusting each other.
Amanda Palmer
#92. I've decided that I'm not going anywhere. Sorry. What? I'm not going anywhere, he repeated. I don't know what you mean, Neil. I mean, he said, speaking more slowly, that I'm not. Going. Anywhere. Even if it takes years. I think I'll stay right here. Like ... here
Amanda Palmer
#93. I think to say that meditation is helpful to artists is true and it's great, but it's also essentially helpful to any kind of process of, just, life.
Amanda Palmer
#94. It's really easy to love passing strangers unconditionally. They demand nothing of you. It is really hard to love people unconditionally when they can hurt you.
Amanda Palmer
#95. I feel that part of my life's artwork is creatively dealing with all this negativity and anger and rage and hatred coming from whatever corners it's coming from and somehow manifesting all of that anger into something positive, which is such a hard job.
Amanda Palmer
#96. I draw the line at letting people into my songwriting cave. To me, that's where the alchemy happens and where the mystery is.
Amanda Palmer
#97. Bands like Nirvana had theatrical sensibilities, playing with image, challenging assumptions people were making about them, the apex being Kurt Cobain in a dress to make a point.
Amanda Palmer
#99. Make me famous, okay? he said, brightly. Maybe I'll finally get some free coffee around here.
Amanda Palmer
#100. And I wonder does everyone else live this way
a succession of tests
a triumphant success
each time I'm still intact at the end of the day
Amanda Palmer
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