93+ Laurie Anderson Quotes On Music, Art And Universe

Laurie Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. She is perhaps best known for her single "O Superman" which reached number two on the UK Singles Chart in 1981. Her multimedia presentation "United States Live" (1983-1984) earned her a Guinness World Record for the longest concert tour of a solo artist. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Laurie Anderson on music, art, love.

Top 10 Laurie Anderson Quotes

1. Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.
2. The world is a strange and wonderful place.
3. Paradise Is exactly like Where you are right now Only much much Better.
4. 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.
5. I've been trying to avoid goal-oriented behavior.
6. Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.
7. 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?
8. Freedon is a scary thing. Most people don't want it.
9. I don't take compliments so well. I always hang my head and shuffle and kind of try to immediately forget.
10. My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.

Laurie Anderson Short Quotes

• I'm not usually where I think I am. It's kind of spooky.
• My job is to make images and leave the decision-making and conclusion-draw ing to other people.
• I'm an average enough person to point to the things I've gotten to see that are awe-inspiring.
• I think women are excellent social critics.
• The problem with prototypes is they don't always work.
• Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.
• It's a little hard to speak when you're not supposed to move.
• I'm actually not someone who believes in heaven or anything like that.
• I am a New Yorker, one; I'm an artist, two; I'm a woman, three.
• I really trust audiences as having excellent taste, for the most part.

Laurie Anderson Quotes About Art

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

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

Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That's a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something. — Laurie Anderson

Art can be engaged in the world without being specifically politically engaged. — Laurie Anderson

Art is about paying attention. — Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson Quotes About Love

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

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

Shining in the midnight moonlight, while the King sings love me tender. — Laurie Anderson

When love is gone, there's always justice. — Laurie Anderson

I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

Laurie Anderson Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last night, I had that dream again. I dreamt I had to take a test, in a Dairy Queen, on another planet. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

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

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

So many things have happened to me in my life that I could be phobic about. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

I don't care about being famous or having a lot of people go, "She's really good." — Laurie Anderson

You need to try to master the ability to feel sad without actually being sad. — Laurie Anderson

That's really a very different experience: You don't have to look to be understood. You're already understood. — Laurie Anderson

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

Don't be afraid of anyone. Imagine your life if you're not afraid of anyone. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

As a New Yorker, I'm someone who lives on an island and looks across to America. — Laurie Anderson

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

The right to carry a gun has nothing to do with the rights of other people. — Laurie Anderson

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

History is an angel being blown backwards into the future — Laurie Anderson

Books are the way the dead talk to the living. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

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

The best thing about the term 'performance artist' is that it includes just about everything you might want to do. — Laurie Anderson

Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us. — Laurie Anderson

I have written a lot about snakes. There's something pretty primordial about it. — Laurie Anderson

It's the tradition of American writers getting away in order to see the country - to get a better view. — Laurie Anderson

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

You can do great things with low-tech stuff. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

They say that Heaven is like TV... a perfect little world, that doesn't really need you. — Laurie Anderson

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

I think a lot of people in Washington are extremely suspicious of NASA. — Laurie Anderson

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

It's just such a great miracle when things do work, and they work for such a wild variety of crazy reasons. — Laurie Anderson

As an artist I'd choose the thing that's beautiful more than the one that's true. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

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

I'm one of the first Americans who wasn't a torturer or an interrogator. — Laurie Anderson

I realized why movie scores are mostly strings, because it really frees your eyes to look around. — Laurie Anderson

. . . I wrote a letter to Thomas Pynchon asking, Can I have your permission to try to make an [adaptation] of your book? And I had no idea that he would answer me, because he's pretty elusive. But he did send a letter back that said, Yes, you can do that - as long as the only instrument in the opera is a banjo. I thought, That's an interesting way of saying No. — Laurie Anderson

Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There's this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive. We're especially drawn to the power. Many of the images of technology are about making us more powerful, extending what we can do. Unfortunately, 95 percent of this is hype, because I think we're powerful without it. — Laurie Anderson

Gut level is a good level to deal with life, and for me, I have to say that Buddhism makes sense for me because it's how I'm an artist. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

I always wonder when people have any kind of spiritual and meditative practice especially if it's one designed in part to help them cope with things that seem unmanageable and to cope with something like death, if they're able to maintain that practice and maintain the equanimity at the time of death whether it's, you know, that person's or that person's loved one. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

Life Lessons by Laurie Anderson

1. Laurie Anderson's work emphasizes the importance of experimentation and pushing boundaries in order to create something unique and meaningful.
2. By embracing the unknown and taking risks, Anderson has been able to explore new ways of expressing her ideas and emotions.
3. Her work has taught us that creativity and innovation can lead to great rewards, and that it is important to stay true to yourself and your vision.