Laurie Anderson Quotes & Sayings

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

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

It's a little hard to speak when you're not supposed to move. — 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'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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

History is an angel being blown backwards into the future — 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

Something that has so much power must have life. Instruments have life. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories. — Laurie Anderson

You can dance.
You can make me laugh.
You've got x-ray eyes.

You know how to sing.
You're a diplomat.
You've got it all.
Everybody loves you.

You can charm the birds out of the sky, But I, I've got
one thing.

You always know just what to say
And when to go,
But I've got one thing.

You can see in the dark,
But I've got one thing:
I loved you better.

Last night I woke up,
Saw this angel.
He flew in my window.
And he said,
Girl, pretty proud of yourself, huh?" And I looked around and said,
Who me?"
And he said, "The higher you fly, the faster you fall."

He said, "Send it up.
Watch it rise.
See it fall,
Gravity's rainbow.
Send it up.
Watch it rise.
See it fall,
Gravity's Angel. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us. — 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'm not usually where I think I am. It's kind of spooky. — Laurie Anderson

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

I'm a real workaholic. — Laurie Anderson

I'm actually not someone who believes in heaven or anything like 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The expert is someone who carries malpractice insurance. — 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

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

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

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

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

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. — Laurie Anderson

The world is a strange and wonderful place. — Laurie Anderson

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

You can do bigger and bigger things. For what? — Laurie Anderson

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

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

Your eyes. It's a day's worth of work to look into them. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

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

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

Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well it was one of those days
Larger than life
When your friends came to dinner
And they stayed the night
And then they cleaned out the refrigerator
And ate everything in sight
And then they stayed up in the livingroom
And cried all night
Strange angels
Singing just for me
Old stories
Haunting me
This is nothing
Like I thought it would be ... — 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

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

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

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

Every book is an alchemical creation, and I'm thinking back to 1857 when Herman Melville arrived in Greece and saw the Parthenon for the first time sitting there like a great beached whale, its big white bones exposed to the winds. But how can this happen? How can a whale turn into a building? Or into a book? In what way can words be alive? — Laurie Anderson

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

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

Ninety percent of the people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that's what makes the jukebox spin. — Laurie Anderson

Art is about paying attention. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

I think women are excellent social critics. — Laurie Anderson

Paradise is exactly like where you are right now ... only much, much better. — Laurie Anderson

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

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

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