Amanda Palmer Quotes

Maybe we should stop asking how do we get people to pay for music, and start asking how do we let them pay for music? from Ted Talk

Asking is, at its core, a collaboration.

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

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

It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!

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

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

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

I hate being ignored.

it's the closest thing I have to church.

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

Sometimes I have a terrible feeling that I am dying not from the virus, but from being untouchable.

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

Take on the pain and wear it as a shirt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but more important, to ask without shame.

Asking is, in itself, the fundamental building block of any relationship.

Certain art hungers for context.

And once I'd unloaded all my teenage pain on him, he knew the way to win my trust. He never told me what to do. Instead, he told me stories.

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

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

Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.

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

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

We are human and our nature is to air.

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

How do we create a world in which people don't think of art just as a product, but as a relationship?

We were far more interested in serving our slowly growing, tight-knit community of weirdos than we were in topping the charts.

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

Nothing is crueller than children who come from good homes.

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

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

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

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.

What's important is that I absorb, listen, talk, connect, help, and share. Constantly.

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

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

Thank God my best friend's a therapist.

Those who can ask without shame are viewing themselves in collaboration with - rather than in competition with - the world.

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

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

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

Nobody ever sees me. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In truth, feeling love from a distance is just lonely. Maybe even worse than no love at all, because it feels so unnatural.

On many days, harder than the act of making the art itself is the act of sharing it and living in a culture that you know is built to tear you down.

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

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

I WILL NEVER HAVE TO HAVE A REAL JOB AGAIN. And technically? I never really did.

It's not easy to ask ... asking makes you vulnerable.

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.

Everyone I know shares toothbrushes. Everyone I know sleeps on each other's floor. Everyone I know uses what they've got and shares what they've got.

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

Just take the fucking donuts.

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

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.

For most of human history, musicians, artists, they've been part of the community - connectors and openers, not untouchable stars.

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

We have the power to help each other.

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

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

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

How do we let people pay for music?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Limitations can expand, rather than shrink, the creative flow.

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

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.

And I wonder does everyone else live this way
a succession of tests
a triumphant success
each time I'm still intact at the end of the day

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

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

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

Given the opportunity, some small consistent portion of the population will happily pay for art.