Top 112 Quotes & Sayings by Laurie Anderson - Page 2

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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!"

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

When love is gone, there's always justice.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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."

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.

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