Quotes by Laurie Anderson

• 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 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.
• 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.
• Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better.
• One of the things I learned from working on the Olympics was, the world does not need another big multimedia show.
• 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.
• My job is to make images and leave the decision-making and conclusion-drawing to other people.
• It's just such a great miracle when things do work, and they work for such a wild variety of crazy reasons.
• Something that has so much power must have life. Instruments have life.
• The thing that's characteristic of my performance is that I literally do drag the whole studio onto the stage.
• My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.
• The fewer expectations you have, the better.
• The problem with prototypes is they don't always work.
• You can do great things with low-tech stuff.
• Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
• 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.
• 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.
• The world is a strange and wonderful place.
• It's good to take a longer view and think, What would I really like to do if I had no limitations whatsoever?
• You can do bigger and bigger things. For what?
• 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 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.
• If there are bases on the moon, that would be the end of the moon as we know it.
• 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.
• I don't take compliments so well. I always hang my head and shuffle and kind of try to immediately forget.
• 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.
• As an artist I'd choose the thing that's beautiful more than the one that's true.
• A lot of words in English confuse the idea of life and electricity, like the word livewire.
• 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 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.
• I have written a lot about snakes. There's something pretty primordial about it.
• I just sort of wish people would dance differently. It reminds me of teenage sex.
• I'm not usually where I think I am. It's kind of spooky.
• 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.
• As a New Yorker, I'm someone who lives on an island and looks across to America.
• I've been trying to avoid goal-oriented behavior.
• I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual.
• I'm an average enough person to point to the things I've gotten to see that are awe-inspiring.
• I'm a real workaholic.
• I think women are excellent social critics.
• I think artists who are attracted to working on the Net will adjust their work to the capabilities of a very small screen.
• I think a lot of people in Washington are extremely suspicious of NASA.
• I so much appreciate it when anybody tries to make something and tries to be an artist - I'm happy to see the work.
• 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.