Laurie Anderson Quotations

Paradise Is exactly like Where you are right now Only much much Better.

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.

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!

A lot of words in English confuse the idea of life and electricity, like the word livewire.

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.

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.

The world is a strange and wonderful place.

One of the things I learned from working on the Olympics was, the world does not need another big multimedia show.

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.

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.

My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.

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

I'm not usually where I think I am. It's kind of spooky.

I'm an average enough person to point to the things I've gotten to see that are awe-inspiring.

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.

I don't take compliments so well. I always hang my head and shuffle and kind of try to immediately forget.

My job is to make images and leave the decision-making and conclusion-drawing to other people.

If there are bases on the moon, that would be the end of the moon as we know it.

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.

It's good to take a longer view and think, what would I really like to do if I had no limitations whatsoever?

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.

I just sort of wish people would dance differently. It reminds me of teenage sex.

I think artists who are attracted to working on the Net will adjust their work to the capabilities of a very small screen.

When you think of the Caribbean today, you think of clear blue warm water, ... Probably about 12 million years ago, it was more like the eastern Pacific; it was a bit cooler. There was greater seasonal change in temperatures, and there were more nutrients around.

When I was a teenager, I dreamed abbout escaping. I was lucky. I succeeded.

My son already knows how to program my phone. I think technology is good. ... They are learning the skills they need at a much younger age. They have their own computers. They have it all. They're spoiled.

You can do bigger and bigger things. For what?

The promoter called and said, 'What should we do?' People were calling to say they were sure it was canceled, but I thought that to have a public event that night would be a good idea.

I see that it has huge benefits for us understanding how and why diversity changes over time and how that might be applied to evaluate potential effects of future environment and climate changes,

The thing that's characteristic of my performance is that I literally do drag the whole studio onto the stage.

Something that has so much power must have life. Instruments have life.

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?

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.

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.

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!"

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."

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

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

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.

being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.

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

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.

The problem with prototypes is they don't always work.

No single person who has ever lived will be able to tell you what happens. Period. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong.

I think women are excellent social critics.

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.

My job is to make images and leave the decision-making and conclusion-draw ing to other people.

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.

I really trust audiences as having excellent taste, for the most part.

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.

Computers are so deeply stupid. What bother me most when they talk about technology is they don't realize how much more exciting their minds are. That machine is stupid. And boring. It does just a few things and then it'll crash. People think, 'I am on the Net, I am in touch with the world'. Wrong! The point is how we work, not how machines work.

. . . 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.

There are plenty of ways you can play the game of fighting and really seem to be fighting without going for the jugular.

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.

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

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

I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual.

I know a lot of people who have weird specialties that are not taught in schools; they're things that you learn in life.

I'm a real workaholic.

I so much appreciate it when anybody tries to make something and tries to be an artist - I'm happy to see the work.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Books are the way the dead talk to the living.

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.

Freedon is a scary thing. Most people don't want it.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I've been trying to avoid goal-oriented behavior.

I am a New Yorker, one; I'm an artist, two; I'm a woman, three.

When love is gone, there's always justice.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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."

And there was a beutiful view But nobody could see Cause everybody on the island Was saying Look at me! Look at me.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The fewer expectations you have, the better.

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.

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.

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