Amanda Palmer Quotes

There's really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. And ... it's lonely

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.

And I've already spent too much time Doing things I didn't want to So if I want to drink alone dressed like a pirate Or look like a dyke Or wear high heels and lipstick Or hide in a convent Or try to be mayor Or marry a writer Smoke crack and slash tires Make jokes you don't like Or paint ducks and retire You can bet your black ass that I'm going to. - from An Evening With Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer, 2013

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 am bigger on the inside
But you have to come inside to see me

I wanted to feel like I could extend someone else's joy and not crush it, and that is the giant paradox nowadays of being a powerful woman: you want to live in a space of compassion and helpfulness and joy and expression, and the world is standing there, pointing the finger at you and telling you that you're greedy and domineering and attention-grabbing, and all you can do is shrug and just say, "Hopefully, someone out there understands and isn't misinterpreting."

It's hard to work on an assembly line of broken hearts Not supposed to fix them, only strip and sell the parts

I am not afraid.
fuck safety.
i rock on purpose ALL THE TIME

If you're going to make work and you're going to write and you're going to put yourself out there and perform, you will be belittled, you will be insulted, you will be called a standard collection of names, you will be accused, and you just have to stand there and continue to work and find a way to not let those things poison you.

It's hard enough to give fearlessly, and it's even harder to receive fearlessly.
But within that exchange lies the hardest thing of all:
To ask. Without shame.
And to accept the help that people offer.
Not to force them.
Just to let them.

Our first job in life is to recognize the gifts we've already got, take the donuts that show up while we cultivate and use those gifts, and then turn around and share those gifts - sometimes in the form of money, sometimes time, sometimes love - back into the puzzle of the world. Our second job is to accept where we are in the puzzle at each moment.

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.

When artists work well, they connect people to themselves, and they stitch people to one another, through this shared experience of discovering a connection that wasn't visible before. Have you ever noticed that this looks like this? And with the same delight that we took as children in seeing a face in a cloud, grown-up artists draw the lines between the bigger dots of grown-up life: sex, love, vanity, violence, illness, death.

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.

I hate it when people don't spend the night.

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

Throughout my career, the fanbase has been like one big significant other to me, a thousand-headed friend with whom I have a real, committed partnership. I

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

This impulse to connect the dots - and to share what you've connected - is the urge that makes you an artist. If

Asking for help with shame says:
You have the power over me.
Asking with condescension says:
I have the power over you.
But asking for help with gratitude says:
We have the power to help each other.

If we can repair things emotionally, a lot of other things would follow.

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.

I suffer mornings most of all
I feel so powerless and small
By ten o'clock I'm back in bed
Fighting the jury in my head

Here's the thing: all of us come from some place of wanting to be seen, understood, accepted, connected. Every single one of us wants to be believed. Artists are often just ... louder about it.

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.

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 you can't have this discussion and you can't have a discussion about feminism and the consciousness of the world without having a discussion about what has happened to men lately. They're holding the other side of the bag.

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.

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.

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.

We are human and our nature is to air.

We all got used to living in the cloud of unknowing.

Anthony once told me: It isn't what you say to people, it's more important what you do with them. It's less important what you do with them than the way you're with them.

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

Make me famous, okay? he said, brightly. Maybe I'll finally get some free coffee around here.

You are an artist when you make someone feel something deep and unexpected.

At the same yoga retreat, we stood and faced each other in pairs, really looking at each other from a close distance. We were told to simply BE with the other person, maintaining eye contact, with no social gestures like laughing, smiling, or winking to put ourselves at ease.
Grown women and men cried. Really and truly sobbed.
When we were finished with the exercise, we talked about how it had felt. The thread echoed again and again: many people had never felt so *seen* by another person. Seen without walls, without judgment ... just seen, acknowledged, accepted. The experience was
for so many painfully rare.

I knew what I needed, but asking for specific emotional things felt impossible and obnoxious. He was a human being. He should just instinctively know how to take care of an emotionally exhausted, sick, post-abortion wife. He ought to just know, I thought. I shouldn't have to fucking ask.

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

I never wanted to grow a thicker skin; I felt a real sense of pride in my thin skin, and in a weird way, I still do, because it's my thin skin that allows me to empathize with other people. It's the thing that allows me to create vulnerable art. It's the thing that allows me to create other feelings and make songs that actually grab people and touch people. I feel like I've spent my life fighting that thicker skin because I don't want to become an embittered asshole.

WHO'S GOT A TAMPON? I JUST GOT MY PERIOD, I will announce loudly to nobody in particular in a women's bathroom in a San Francisco restaurant, or to a co-ed dressing room of a music festival in Prague, or to the unsuspecting gatherers in a kitchen at a party in Sydney, Munich, or Cincinnati. Invariably, across the world, I have seen and heard the rustling of female hands through backpacks and purses, until the triumphant moment when a stranger fishes one out with a kind smile. No money is ever exchanged. The unspoken universal understanding is: Today, it is my turn to take the tampon. Tomorrow, it shall be yours. There is a constant, karmic tampon circle. It also exists, I've found, with Kleenex, cigarettes, and ballpoint pens.

People can understand a price tag no matter what it's stuck on. But they couldn't understand the messier exchange of asking and giving: the gift that stays in motion.

I think the Internet really sussed things into perspective. Because twelve years ago, I could spend my days on writing and running my band and touring and making posters and practicing with my band and working on my vocals, but I didn't spend a large pie chart of my time sifting through criticism as well, and nowadays I do, and all female artists do, because to be able to promote your work, you need to live in those spaces.

I still get laughed at but it doesn't bother me,
I'm just so glad to hear laughter around me.

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.

He'd believed for a long time, deep down, that people didn't actually fall in love. That they were all faking it.

Almost every important human encounter boils down to the act, and the art, of asking.

Life as it should be: all friends, all art, all music, all love, all the time.

Asking is, at its core, a collaboration.

Those who ask without fear learn to say two things, with or without words, to those they are facing: I deserve to ask and You are welcome to say no. Because the ask that is conditional cannot be a gift.

I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing - you're falling into the audience and you're trusting each other.

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

When you're an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it.

Nobody ever sees me. Thank you.

I'm still trying to express my truth, my place in the world, my belief.

Certain art hungers for context.

We have the power to help each other.

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

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.

The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of 'real' grown-ups who you believe - at some subconscious level - are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying:
We've been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.

I feel that part of my life's artwork is creatively dealing with all this negativity and anger and rage and hatred coming from whatever corners it's coming from and somehow manifesting all of that anger into something positive, which is such a hard job.

That night changed my life: I was finally experiencing, in person, the songs that had been the soundtrack of my life for the past few years, the lyric-images I'd memorized after hours of headphone-listening on walks to school, the words that had been direct-deposited into my heart though the channel of my ears
I was hearing them here, now, in a moment that would never exist again.

When you connect with people, they want to help you.

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

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.

There was a dance that everyone was doing that was heavily skewed with the power in one direction, but the dance was basically working, and then the dance got really disrupted with the first wave of feminism, and nobody found their footing yet - not the guys, not the women.

A farmer is sitting on his porch in a chair, hanging out.
A friend walks up to the porch to say hello, and hears an awful yelping, squealing sound coming from inside the house.
"What's that terrifyin' sound?" asks the friend.
"It's my dog," said the farmer. "He's sittin' on a nail."
"Why doesn't he just sit up and get off it?" asks the friend.
The farmer deliberates on this and replies:
"Doesn't hurt enough yet.

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

It's fine for people to say, "If you can't stand the heat and if you can't stand the criticism, then just don't use the Internet"; unfortunately, that is not an option. The Internet is where we make our living and where we make our work, especially if we're independents and we cannot afford to not engage, because that's where our business is driving from. It's just not an option.

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

I want to be happy. i want to make people happy. i do not need to be rich to do that.

Everybody out there is winging it to some degree, of this we can be pretty sure.

We've been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE DOING. You

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.

There are so many people, so many artists, so many magazines, so many theater companies, so many people trying to raise money for so many things that it's easy to look around and just feel powerless or helpless, because even if you have some resources, you can't help everybody.

My blog readership grew steadily as I started to dump more of my inner self onto the page. I

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

The key is to just focus on the spots where the love is real, because you can just drive yourself crazy focusing on the negativity, focusing on the relationships that are irreparable and just aren't going to work, trying to convince the haters that you are indeed lovable. So much of that is wasted energy.

To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding.
To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art. Theater, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what art does. Good or bad, it imagines the insides, the heart of the other, whether that heart is full of light or trapped in darkness.

I think a good role model has to be sexy. Real, empowered, self-possessed women are sexy. When you're really in control of your choices, your mood, your body, and your opinions, people find you sexy.

For real? I dropped my cell phone in a puddle this morning, couldn't find my keys, can't hold down a relationship, and here I am clutching a sharp knife about to cut someone's head open. And they could die. Who is letting me do this? This is BULLSHIT.

Before I saw your talk, I always thought of street performers as beggars.

WHEN YOU CANNOT JOKE ABOUT THE DARKNESS OF LIFE, THAT'S WHEN THE DARKNESS TAKES OVER.

How do we let people pay for music?

There's a fundamental disconnection in society in the way we live, this way we live that we take so for granted, and we've become very separate from one another and we don't really take lot of time to realize that. And the math is overwhelming to the point of despair, but the answers could be so simple.

This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.

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

You can't ask authentically and gracefully without truly being able to accept "No" for an answer. Because if you're not truly willing to accept "No" for an answer, you're not really asking, you're demanding  -  you're begging. At least, that's how I've come to understand asking.

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

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

You are not to blame,
The world's a viscous place,
So go on and think how you want,
You will not be alone in your thoughts,
Well you will but you won't in a way,
Cause a girl thought it too in a book that the library bought

It was essential to feel thankful for the few who stopped to watch or listen, instead of wasting energy on resenting the majority who passed me by.

As I moved through my life as a statue and later as a musician, I started to understand. There's a difference between wanting to be looked at and wanting to be seen.

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

i know which side of the train i was on today.

The field of asking is fundamentally improvisational. It thrives not in the creation of rules and etiquette but in the smashing of that etiquette.
Which is to say: there are no rules.
Or, rather, there are plenty of rules, but they ask, on bended knees, to be broken.

​
Whatever we are given is supposed to be given away, not kept.

If you love people enough, they will give you everything.

it's the closest thing I have to church.

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