Amanda Palmer Quotes
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I've always felt like an outsider across the board, since day one. The challenge has been to simply not pay attention to my outsider or insider status and just do the work and play the shows and connect with the people. And not even bother to play this game of keeping score, which is what destroys you.
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I still get laughed at but it doesn't bother me, I'm just so glad to hear laughter around me.
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I'm still trying to express my truth, my place in the world, my belief.
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You know what’s really cool? Wake up every morning, decide what you feel like doing, and do it.
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I get really fantastic results when I just get out of my own way.
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I kind of rely on my artist friends to make my physical music worth buying by having them all come together and create beautiful artwork that everyone is gonna want to own to support my record.
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When we really see each other, we want to help each other.
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I feel like if I were to play the game completely and just get myself in a giant bottle of nail polish and put myself on display, I would feel like I had somehow cosmically lost. I feel like I'm taking a bunch of the ingredients and using some of them but not all of them and shuffling around and making people think I'm doing my job.
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Men find powerful women so threatening, and finding a partner was starting to look laughable, because I would be really attracted to guys and they would just be so threatened and I didn't like feeling threatening, I didn't want to feel threatened, I didn't want to feel like I was towering over anybody.
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I think I've always felt as a band and as a musician and a music business person, I've always felt like an outsider, period.
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You are an artist when you make someone feel something deep and unexpected.
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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.
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I make the music that I want to make and make the show that I want to make. If you like it, you come. If you don't like it, you don't have to.
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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.
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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.
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The world needs actual excitement and emotion more than it needs cool people.
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I think the thing you're seeing now with the music industry is that the people who have tight-knit communities are now able to really hold each other up because of the internet tools. And the really top-down pyramid scheme of major labels and typical superstars isn't sustainable anymore because the system has collapsed.
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While we're over here blocked up in our departments and locked up in our own judgments and dealing with our own crazy problems, they're over there dealing with equivalent problems. One of the things that I am so frightened by lately is that men are having just as difficult a time striking a balance as we are.
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I'm bisexual, but it's not the sort of thing I spent a lot of time thinking about. I've slept with girls; I've slept with guys, so I guess that's what they call it! I'm not anti trying to use language to simplify our lives.
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If you love people enough, they will give you everything.
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Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.
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All of my music, my stage show, my personality, my blog, my twitter feed, anything that's made me me, and a huge part of why people like and respect me, is that I just don't spend much energy on that other stuff. It's not worth it. It's a losing battle too. You're just screwed the minute you engage.
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I want to live in a world where Miley (or any female musician) can twerk wildly at 20, wear a full-cover floral hippie mumu at 37, show up at 47 in see-through latex, and pose semi-naked, like Keith & co, on the cover of Rolling Stone at 57 and be APPLAUDED for being so comfortable with her body.
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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.
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Thank God my best friend's a therapist.
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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.
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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.
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It’s not easy to ask… asking makes you vulnerable.
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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.
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Twitter fascinates me because it's real. It feels kind of unreal, but it makes very real things happen.
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