Top 100 Laurie Anderson Quotes
#1. Art can be engaged in the world without being specifically politically engaged.
Laurie Anderson
#2. Some friends of mine work in an office. They were getting really nervous from their coffee breaks, so they started to have wig breaks. They tried on wigs for 15 minutes. They found this relaxing. So that's Wig Therapy.
Laurie Anderson
#3. I'm thrilled by the fact that I made something out of nothing. There it is! It wasn't there before: there it is - I made it! That's pretty powerful, and that's the power that Buddhists give to every single person.
Laurie Anderson
#4. And there was a beautiful view,
But nobody could see.
'Cause everyone in the Island was saiyng,
Look at me! Look at me!
Laurie Anderson
#5. I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.
Laurie Anderson
#6. Don't be afraid of anyone. Imagine your life if you're not afraid of anyone.
Laurie Anderson
#7. People are really suffering these days. There's a lot of corporate triumph and a lot of personal despair as they wonder what are they working for.
Laurie Anderson
#8. Shining in the midnight moonlight, while the King sings love me tender.
Laurie Anderson
#10. I think a lot of people in Washington are extremely suspicious of NASA.
Laurie Anderson
#11. If I'm confused, I just spend some time looking at the sky and falling into it. It's not a meditation that anyone taught me, it's something I've done my whole life, and liked doing, and it made me feel like nothing.
Laurie Anderson
#12. Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.
Laurie Anderson
#13. A lot of the work in United States is highly critical of technology. I'm using 15,000 watts of power and 18 different pieces of electronic equipment to say that.
Laurie Anderson
#14. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.
Laurie Anderson
#15. All of nature talks to me - if I could just figure out what it's saying - trees are swinging in the breeze. They're talking to me. Insects are rubbing their legs together. They're all talking. They're talking to me.
Laurie Anderson
#16. My job is to make images and leave the decision-making and conclusion-drawing to other people.
Laurie Anderson
#18. I'm an average enough person to point to the things I've gotten to see that are awe-inspiring.
Laurie Anderson
#19. At the School of Visual Arts in New York, you can get your degree in Net art, which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways.
Laurie Anderson
#21. My parents didn't raise me to be religious. The closest we come to worship is the Trinity of Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.
Laurie Anderson
#22. I always feel like if someone has stage fright, I really try and say, "Listen, these people want you to succeed, they want to have a good evening. They want to see something really great. They don't want to see something crappy. They don't. They want to be at something really special."
Laurie Anderson
#23. So many things have happened to me in my life that I could be phobic about.
Laurie Anderson
#24. I am a New Yorker, one; I'm an artist, two; I'm a woman, three.
Laurie Anderson
#25. When love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom!
Laurie Anderson
#26. And there was a beutiful view
But nobody could see
Cause everybody on the island
Was saying Look at me! Look at me.
Laurie Anderson
#27. I think illusion is one of the most interesting things that I've found to think about. Just look at yesterday, and what you were doing, and how important it was, and how nonexistent it is now! How dreamlike it is! Same thing with tomorrow. So where are we living?
Laurie Anderson
#28. It's the tradition of American writers getting away in order to see the country - to get a better view.
Laurie Anderson
#29. It's just such a great miracle when things do work, and they work for such a wild variety of crazy reasons.
Laurie Anderson
#30. As a New Yorker, I'm someone who lives on an island and looks across to America.
Laurie Anderson
#31. They say that Heaven is like TV ... a perfect little world, that doesn't really need you.
Laurie Anderson
#32. I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual.
Laurie Anderson
#33. Why do you have to translate and decode things? Just let the image be. It will have a special kind of reality that it won't once it's decoded.
Laurie Anderson
#34. The only stuff I don't like are Broadway musicals. I hate them. I don't even like to talk about it. I can't bear musicals.
Laurie Anderson
#36. You know the reason I love the stars is because we can't hurt them: we can't burn them, we can't melt them , we can't make them overflow, we can't flood them or burn them up - so we keep reacing for them
Laurie Anderson
#37. As an artist I'd choose the thing that's beautiful more than the one that's true.
Laurie Anderson
#38. Audiences, whether they're seeing a film or a reading or whatever it is, a concert, they decide very quickly what kind of show it is, and then they judge it. They judge the rest of the thing by whether it conforms to their rules for what a good symphony orchestra would be.
Laurie Anderson
#39. What happens when you're in a crash is you join a crash club, and you talk endlessly about your crash because you don't want to bore your friends with it. And they've heard about the crash so many times.
Laurie Anderson
#40. You know, I can see two tiny pictures of myself And there's one in each of your eyes. And they're doin' everything I do. Every time I light a cigarette, they light up theirs. I take a drink and I look in and they're drinkin' too. It's drivin' me crazy. It's drivin' me nuts.
Laurie Anderson
#41. I know a lot of people who have weird specialties that are not taught in schools; they're things that you learn in life.
Laurie Anderson
#42. You know, for every dollar a man makes a woman makes 63 cents. Now, fifty years ago that was 62 cents. So, with that kind of luck, it'll be the year 3,888 before we make a buck.
Laurie Anderson
#43. The expert is someone who carries malpractice insurance.
Laurie Anderson
#44. The right to carry a gun has nothing to do with the rights of other people.
Laurie Anderson
#45. When you follow your thoughts and watch them attach to certain things, it makes certain things real and other things unreal, and you realize that this is all created by your mind.
Laurie Anderson
#46. I so much appreciate it when anybody tries to make something and tries to be an artist - I'm happy to see the work.
Laurie Anderson
#47. Life goes by so fast. It's really - and a lot of times things happen so fast you don't know - how should I react.
Laurie Anderson
#48. A lot of artists who have a certain style are expected to more or less keep doing their style. It's so easy to get into that rut of production.
Laurie Anderson
#49. I'm actually not someone who believes in heaven or anything like that.
Laurie Anderson
#50. It's good to take a longer view and think, What would I really like to do if I had no limitations whatsoever?
Laurie Anderson
#51. A lot of words in English confuse the idea of life and electricity, like the word livewire.
Laurie Anderson
#52. Paradise is exactly like where you are right now ... only much, much better.
Laurie Anderson
#53. It's a little hard to speak when you're not supposed to move.
Laurie Anderson
#54. I just sort of wish people would dance differently. It reminds me of teenage sex.
Laurie Anderson
#56. I have written a few children's books. The first book that I wrote was for children. It was called 'The Package', and it was a mystery story in pictures. It had no words.
Laurie Anderson
#57. I don't take compliments so well. I always hang my head and shuffle and kind of try to immediately forget.
Laurie Anderson
#58. If there are bases on the moon, that would be the end of the moon as we know it.
Laurie Anderson
#59. History is an angel being blown backwards into the future
Laurie Anderson
#60. When I was four, I was a kind of sky worshipper. I would look at the sky, and I wanted to evaporate into the sky - I loved the sky. I loved looking at the trees, just because they touched the sky.
Laurie Anderson
#61. Something that has so much power must have life. Instruments have life.
Laurie Anderson
#62. I genuinely have never been in an audience where most people want that person to fail. I've never been in an audience like that, and I've never seen it as a performer. Only in my dreams, in which case they are always throwing tomatoes and going, "This is the most boring thing I've ever seen."
Laurie Anderson
#63. My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.
Laurie Anderson
#64. I kind of didn't believe the doctors when they came over and they said you're not going to be able to walk again. I'm sorry to tell you this. I thought who is this guy? I just was so impatient with the whole thing. I knew I was going to walk again. I knew that I was going to do that.
Laurie Anderson
#65. One of the things I learned from working on the Olympics was, the world does not need another big multimedia show.
Laurie Anderson
#66. The thing that's characteristic of my performance is that I literally do drag the whole studio onto the stage.
Laurie Anderson
#67. I realized why movie scores are mostly strings, because it really frees your eyes to look around.
Laurie Anderson
#68. Not many people care what you do. They care about what you do as much as you care about what they do. Think about it. Just exactly that much. You are not the center of the universe.
Laurie Anderson
#69. The problem with prototypes is they don't always work.
Laurie Anderson
#71. People only stutter at the beginning of the word. They're not afraid when they get to the end of the word. There's just regret.
Laurie Anderson
#72. I think artists who are attracted to working on the Net will adjust their work to the capabilities of a very small screen.
Laurie Anderson
#73. I didn't really understand that Vipassana is a relatively new form of Buddhism that was based on the storage of pain. So the idea is that every time you don't scream, that's your Buddhist side.
Laurie Anderson
#74. The audience creates its own personality, I've noticed, in the first five minutes. They will either be generous, funny, silly, withholding, academic, analytical, grudging. And I'm fascinated with how that gets constructed, because it happens right away.
Laurie Anderson
#75. I have written a lot about snakes. There's something pretty primordial about it.
Laurie Anderson
#76. I really trust audiences as having excellent taste, for the most part.
Laurie Anderson
#77. I've never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn't made money with it.
Laurie Anderson
#78. Last night, I had that dream again. I dreamt I had to take a test, in a Dairy Queen, on another planet.
Laurie Anderson
#79. When you meet a man who is broken, pick him up and carry him. When you meet a woman who's broken, put her all into your arms. Cause we don't know where we come from ... we don't know where we are.
Laurie Anderson
#80. The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist - that it's a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority.
Laurie Anderson
#81. Besides all those whaling details, Moby Dick is about someone who's looking for something so huge, something they've wanted all their life, yet they know when they find it, it will kill them.
Laurie Anderson
#82. You need to try to master the ability to feel sad without actually being sad.
Laurie Anderson
#83. I see and write things first as an artist, second as a woman, and third as a New Yorker. All three have built-in perspectives that aren't neutral.
Laurie Anderson
#84. No single person who has ever lived will be able to tell you what happens. Period. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong.
Laurie Anderson
#85. If you're a young artist, wondering what to call yourself, consider 'multimedia artist.' It's so vague. Then, no one can say, 'Hey, how come you're a jazz person, and you're making a pop opera?
Laurie Anderson
#86. There are plenty of ways you can play the game of fighting and really seem to be fighting without going for the jugular.
Laurie Anderson
#87. I fell in love with the idea that the mysterious thing you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive. (Explaining her attraction to Moby-Dick)
Laurie Anderson
#88. My work is more about trying to ask good questions and not trying to come up with big shows. Every fashion company is doing that, every car company is doing that.
Laurie Anderson
#90. I'm not usually where I think I am. It's kind of spooky.
Laurie Anderson
#91. Ninety percent of the people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that's what makes the jukebox spin.
Laurie Anderson
#92. Dogs don't just like us, they love us, and they admire us. The big reason they admire us is we invented cars. They're like, "Yes, we get to go somewhere!" Go somewhere faster, with their head out the window, and their ears, like, "Yes! Yes!"
Laurie Anderson
#93. I wanted to stay hooked because it was the first time I've been part of the tradition where forgetting was just fine. You do it, you try, you forget, you fail.
Laurie Anderson
#95. The best thing about the term 'performance artist' is that it includes just about everything you might want to do.
Laurie Anderson
#96. We want to dedicate our music tonight to the great opportunity that we all have to begin to truly understand the events of the past few days and to act upon them with courage and with compassion as we make our plans to live in a completely new world.
Laurie Anderson
#97. I wanted to impress people because I was kind of a kid who was lost in the crowd - was sort of my, feeling about childhood was being part of a big family.
Laurie Anderson
#98. I'm one of the first Americans who wasn't a torturer or an interrogator.
Laurie Anderson
#99. People who were born alone are defined by feelings like "Who's gonna be with me when I die? Who will ever understand me? Will I always feel so alone? Maybe if I write a book ... " and you forget that that doesn't help you so much.
Laurie Anderson
#100. Performance art is about joy, about making something that's so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can't put into words.
Laurie Anderson
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
