Top 100 Amanda Palmer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

3. “Crowdfunding as an idea itself isn’t new – bands have been doing it since the dawn of time.”

— Amanda Palmer

4. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

5. “What’s important is that I absorb, listen, talk, connect, help, and share. Constantly.”

— Amanda Palmer

6. “Eat the pain. Send it back into the void as love.”

— Amanda Palmer

7. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

10. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

11. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

12. “The professionals know they’re winging it. The amateurs pretend they’re not.”

— Amanda Palmer

13. “The impulse to connect the dots – and to share what you’ve connected – is the urge that makes you an artist.”

— Amanda Palmer

14. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

16. “When you’re afraid of someone’s judgment, you can’t connect with them. You’re too preoccupied with the task of impressing them.”

— Amanda Palmer

17. “You can’t ever give people what they want. But you can give them something else. You can give them empathy. You can give them understanding. And that’s a lot, and enough to give.”

— Amanda Palmer

18. “I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is just access to the possibility of freedom that you don’t have to be totally depressed and enslaved by your own environment.”

— Amanda Palmer

19. “You’re not going to be perfect, you’re not going to stop berating yourself, you’re not going to stop the comparisons, you’re not going to stop the judgment, but you can become evermore mindful of it, and that has to be good enough.”

— Amanda Palmer

20. “Asking for help requires authenticity, and vulnerability.”

— Amanda Palmer

21. “Thank God my best friend’s a therapist.”

— Amanda Palmer

22. “I hate being ignored.”

— Amanda Palmer

23. “There’s nothing more threatening than a powerful woman, and there’s nothing more threatening to the current order of things than women powerfully owning their own narrative. It’s so threatening to people, to women as well, and it’s threatening the order of things.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

25. “Nothing is crueller than children who come from good homes.”

— Amanda Palmer

26. “Take on the pain and wear it as a shirt.”

— Amanda Palmer

27. “I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing – you’re falling into the audience and you’re trusting each other.”

— Amanda Palmer

28. “There’s really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. Andit’s lonely.”

— Amanda Palmer

29. “One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians.”

— Amanda Palmer

30. “I firmly believe in music being as free as possible. Unlocked. Shared and spread. In order for artists to survive and create, their audiences need to step up and directly support them.”

— Amanda Palmer

31. “The challenge in my life really is keeping the balance between feeling creatively energized and fulfilled without feeling overwhelmed and like Im in the middle of a battlefield.”

— Amanda Palmer

32. “When we really see each other, we want to help each other.”

— Amanda Palmer

33. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

34. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

35. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

39. “It is terrifying to people when women step up and start owning the story that they have not owned. And I’m seeing so much of this, and it is a seismic shift.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

42. “When you trust people to help you, they often do.”

— Amanda Palmer

43. “There’s something advantageous about being a woman in rock versus, say, a woman in chemistry or construction. There’s definitely a built-in sexism across the board, but I think you’re afforded a degree of freedom in rock because, historically, the rules have been flexible.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

45. “I’m still trying to express my truth, my place in the world, my belief.”

— Amanda Palmer

46. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

47. “I’m a massive fan of David Lynch and ‘Twin Peaks.’”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

49. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

50. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer