Top 100 Amanda Palmer Quotes
#1. When the day comes, I'll get up at his funeral and break a giant stick. Then I'll head to a bar and spend the rest of the night drinking, laughing, crying... and waiting to die. Somebody bring a stick. - Amanda Palmer New York City June 26th, 2012
C. Anthony Martignetti
#2. Miley Cyrus is about making money. Amanda Palmer is about making art.
Eddi Reader
#3. There's a huge cloud of shame around art and business being seen as bedfellows.
Amanda Palmer
#4. I still get laughed at but it doesn't bother me,
I'm just so glad to hear laughter around me.
Amanda Palmer
#5. I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is just access to the possibility of freedom that you don't have to be totally depressed and enslaved by your own environment.
Amanda Palmer
#6. One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians.
Amanda Palmer
#7. 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
#8. Crowdfunding as an idea itself isn't new - bands have been doing it since the dawn of time.
Amanda Palmer
#9. We all got used to living in the cloud of unknowing.
Amanda Palmer
#11. I suppose I'm happy to sell my time and energy, but I'm not happy to sell my initial creative time.
Amanda Palmer
#12. I think I've been addicted to openness since long before my rock career. I was terrible as a teenager. I used to go out of my way to make people uncomfortable with personal details. I was always fascinated by the idea that we have these weird, random boundaries between what we do and don't show.
Amanda Palmer
#13. Art is food for the soul, and an artistic climate is a healthy climate because it breeds empathy.
Amanda Palmer
#14. I want to be happy. i want to make people happy. i do not need to be rich to do that.
Amanda Palmer
#15. I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.
Amanda Palmer
#16. I crave intimacy to the same burning degree that I detest commitment.
Amanda Palmer
#17. 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
#19. 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
#20. There's really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. And ... it's lonely
Amanda Palmer
#21. Throughout my career, the fanbase has been like one big significant other to me, a thousand-headed friend with whom I have a real, committed partnership. I
Amanda Palmer
#22. I've apologized tons of times. The only thing I must not do is break the code of honesty and steady, forthright contact. You can fix almost anything by authentically communicating.
Amanda Palmer
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Twitter fascinates me because it's real. It feels kind of unreal, but it makes very real things happen.
Amanda Palmer
#26. What's important is that I absorb, listen, talk, connect, help, and share. Constantly.
Amanda Palmer
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. We've been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE DOING. You
Amanda Palmer
#30. When you trust people to help you, they often do.
Amanda Palmer
#31. Everybody out there is winging it to some degree, of this we can be pretty sure.
Amanda Palmer
#32. Every album is just a greatest hits of whatever songs are on a pile when I go in to make a record.
Amanda Palmer
#33. You are an artist when you make someone feel something deep and unexpected.
Amanda Palmer
#35. It's not easy to ask ... asking makes you vulnerable.
Amanda Palmer
#37. I'm a massive fan of David Lynch and 'Twin Peaks.'
Amanda Palmer
#38. You can't ever give people what they want. But you can give them something else. You can give them empathy. You can give them understanding. And that's a lot, and enough to give.
Amanda Palmer
#40. 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
#41. For most of human history, musicians, artists, they've been part of the community - connectors and openers, not untouchable stars.
Amanda Palmer
#42. 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
#43. I want to live in a world where Miley (or any female musician) can twerk wildly at 20, wear a full-cover floral hippie mumu at 37, show up at 47 in see-through latex, and pose semi-naked, like Keith & co, on the cover of Rolling Stone at 57 and be APPLAUDED for being so comfortable with her body.
Amanda Palmer
#44. My blog readership grew steadily as I started to dump more of my inner self onto the page. I
Amanda Palmer
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Asking is, in itself, the fundamental building block of any relationship.
Amanda Palmer
#49. He needs shaking up, I tell you, he's going to die an old maid. He gets all funny and red when unmarried ladies talk to him at church, and just look at how grumpy he's been since you've been around. We've got to save him, Amanda, he said solemnly.
Diana Palmer
#50. 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
#51. It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!
Amanda Palmer
#52. For real? I dropped my cell phone in a puddle this morning, couldn't find my keys, can't hold down a relationship, and here I am clutching a sharp knife about to cut someone's head open. And they could die. Who is letting me do this? This is BULLSHIT.
Amanda Palmer
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. This impulse to connect the dots - and to share what you've connected - is the urge that makes you an artist. If
Amanda Palmer
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Before I saw your talk, I always thought of street performers as beggars.
Amanda Palmer
#59. 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
#60. When you connect with people, they want to help you.
Amanda Palmer
#61. 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
#62. Given the opportunity, some small consistent portion of the population will happily pay for art.
Amanda Palmer
#63. 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
#64. I think you can't have this discussion and you can't have a discussion about feminism and the consciousness of the world without having a discussion about what has happened to men lately. They're holding the other side of the bag.
Amanda Palmer
#65. 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
#66. I am not afraid.
fuck safety.
i rock on purpose ALL THE TIME
Amanda Palmer
#67. 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
#68. I knew what I needed, but asking for specific emotional things felt impossible and obnoxious. He was a human being. He should just instinctively know how to take care of an emotionally exhausted, sick, post-abortion wife. He ought to just know, I thought. I shouldn't have to fucking ask.
Amanda Palmer
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. When we really see each other, we want to help each other.
Amanda Palmer
#73. Here's the thing: all of us come from some place of wanting to be seen, understood, accepted, connected. Every single one of us wants to be believed. Artists are often just ... louder about it.
Amanda Palmer
#74. 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
#75. I am bigger on the inside
But you have to come inside to see me
Amanda Palmer
#76. Nothing is crueller than children who come from good homes.
Amanda Palmer
#77. 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
#78. I have never in my career embarked on a journey towards controversy. I have never deliberately set a flame.
Amanda Palmer
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Neil Gaiman swooped into my life though another friend, Jason Webley, who knew we were fans of each other's work and introduced us via email. Neil and I, like me and Ben, just hit it off instantly.
Amanda Palmer
#83. And when you're afraid of someone's judgment, you can't connect with them. You're too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.
Amanda Palmer
#84. 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
#85. Sometimes I have a terrible feeling that I am dying not from the virus, but from being untouchable.
Amanda Palmer
#86. 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
#87. If we can repair things emotionally, a lot of other things would follow.
Amanda Palmer
#88. I think performance art comes from a simple place of wanting to express things beyond just sound.
Amanda Palmer
#89. The impulse to connect the dots - and to share what you've connected - is the urge that makes you an artist
Amanda Palmer
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. I was just a very dark kid. My family was complicated.
Amanda Palmer
#94. I WILL NEVER HAVE TO HAVE A REAL JOB AGAIN. And technically? I never really did.
Amanda Palmer
#95. 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
#96. I've been in a recording studio enough times to know that it is not the best place to multitask. Doing a couple of takes of a song and running out to check your email to talk to someone about video production really is not good.
Amanda Palmer
#97. We were far more interested in serving our slowly growing, tight-knit community of weirdos than we were in topping the charts.
Amanda Palmer
#99. If you're willing to take risks, Twitter is a vast amusement park of interesting life possibilities.
Amanda Palmer
#100. How do we create a world in which people don't think of art just as a product, but as a relationship?
Amanda Palmer
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