Top 145 Quotes & Sayings by Amanda Palmer

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.

I was just a very dark kid. My family was complicated.

I hate being ignored.

If you're willing to take risks, Twitter is a vast amusement park of interesting life possibilities.

I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.

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.

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.

There's a huge cloud of shame around art and business being seen as bedfellows.

Every album is just a greatest hits of whatever songs are on a pile when I go in to make a record.

I get so many ideas for songs, but I'm so seldom disciplined enough to sit down and crank them out.

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.

Twitter fascinates me because it's real. It feels kind of unreal, but it makes very real things happen.

Meditation, especially for people who don't know very much about it and think it's this very hippy dippy thing, can really be powerful, terrifying even, as it lifts the rug up on your subconscious and the dust comes flying out.

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.

The stage show is, in some sense, highly theatrical. It's definitely not just a band in jeans playing rock and roll.

My number-one goal is to never feel like I'm strictly defining myself. The minute I feel like I'm doing that as anything - as theatrical, as feminist, as songwriter - I feel like the minute I name it, I'm stuck in a box.

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.

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.

I have never in my career embarked on a journey towards controversy. I have never deliberately set a flame.

I think to say that meditation is helpful to artists is true and it's great, but it's also essentially helpful to any kind of process of, just, life.

Crowdfunding as an idea itself isn't new - bands have been doing it since the dawn of time.

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.

I'm a massive fan of David Lynch and 'Twin Peaks.'

Bands like Nirvana had theatrical sensibilities, playing with image, challenging assumptions people were making about them, the apex being Kurt Cobain in a dress to make a point.

If you stuck me in a room and gave me art-making tools but told me no one would ever see the results, I don't think I'd have much desire to make art. What I do comes from a deep desire to be seen and to see others.

The world needs actual excitement and emotion more than it needs cool people.

Thank God my best friend's a therapist.

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.

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.

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.

I don't feel at home in New Orleans. I don't feel at home in Austin or L.A. And I just felt immediately at home in northern Australia.

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.

I suppose I'm happy to sell my time and energy, but I'm not happy to sell my initial creative time.

The challenge in my life really is keeping the balance between feeling creatively energized and fulfilled without feeling overwhelmed and like I'm in the middle of a battlefield.

I draw the line at letting people into my songwriting cave. To me, that's where the alchemy happens and where the mystery is.

I think performance art comes from a simple place of wanting to express things beyond just sound.

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.

There's something advantageous about being a woman in rock versus, say, a woman in chemistry or construction. There's definitely a built-in sexism across the board, but I think you're afforded a degree of freedom in rock because, historically, the rules have been flexible.

If you want the world to pay for projects, you have to be able to display why you're worthy.

Art is food for the soul, and an artistic climate is a healthy climate because it breeds empathy.

You know what’s really cool? Wake up every morning, decide what you feel like doing, and do it.

When you cannot joke about the darkness of life, that’s when the darkness takes over.

I think I can define my entire life, virtuosity and business philosophy down to the core fundamental that I absolutely hate being told what to do. But like any artist or any human being out there, I desperately want to be loved, and I spend my entire life trying to balance those two facts.

You're not going to be perfect, you're not going to stop berating yourself, you're not going to stop the comparisons, you're not going to stop the judgment, but you can become evermore mindful of it, and that has to be good enough.

I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is how do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, how do we let people pay for music?

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.

Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.

There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to university, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in your head. You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.

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.

I get really fantastic results when I just get out of my own way.

American culture in particular has instilled in us the bizarre notion that to ask for help amounts to an admission of failure. But some of the most powerful, successful, admired people in the world seem, to me, to have something in common: they ask constantly, creatively, compassionately, and gracefully. And to be sure: when you ask, there's always the possibility of a no on the other side of the request. If we don't allow for that no, we're not actually asking, we're either begging or demanding. But it is the fear of the no that keeps so many of our mouths sewn tightly shut.

I crave intimacy to the same burning degree that I detest commitment.

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

Eat the pain. Send it back into the void as love.

I don't think of myself as particularly cursed or blessed. I think I got dealt a set of cards, and I'm playing with them, sometimes in heels, sometimes in combat boots.

When you're afraid of someone's judgment, you can't connect with them. You're too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.

The challenge is to just focus on what's actually happening, focus on the people who get it, and focus on the people who are listening.

When we really see each other, we want to help each other.

When you trust people to help you, they often do.

I had a real come-to-Jesus a couple of years ago when I started to see the direct line between feminism and everything else - feminism and climate change, feminism and poverty, feminism and hunger - and it was almost like I was born again and started walking down the street and was like, "Oh, my God, there are women everywhere! They're just everywhere you look. There's women all over the place!"