Top 100 Amanda Palmer Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “For most of human history, musicians, artists, they’ve been part of the community – connectors and openers, not untouchable stars.”

— Amanda Palmer

52. “I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, ‘How do we make people pay for music?’ What if we started asking, ‘How do we LET people pay for music?’”

— Amanda Palmer

53. “From what I’ve seen, it isn’t so much the act of asking that paralyzes us – it’s what lies beneath: the fear of being vulnerable, the fear of rejection, the fear of looking needy or weak. The fear of being seen as a burdensome member of the community instead of a productive one.”

— Amanda Palmer

54. “If you love people enough, they will give you everything.”

— Amanda Palmer

55. “Twitter fascinates me because it’s real. It feels kind of unreal, but it makes very real things happen.”

— Amanda Palmer

56. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

57. “It’s really easy to love passing strangers unconditionally. They demand nothing of you. It is really hard to love people unconditionally when they can hurt you.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

59. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

61. “It is really hard to love people unconditionally when they can hurt you.”

— Amanda Palmer

62. “It made me consider one of the reasons I loved my fanbase so much: they are wholly independent and have their own unassailable, discerning tastes. They weren’t looking to me as a leader to follow blindly, there to dictate their choices. They were looking to me as a connector, a coordinator, which was the role I wanted.”

— Amanda Palmer

63. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

64. “We have the power to help each other.”

— Amanda Palmer

65. “I think I’ve been addicted to openness since long before my rock career. I was terrible as a teenager. I used to go out of my way to make people uncomfortable with personal details. I was always fascinated by the idea that we have these weird, random boundaries between what we do and don’t show.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

68. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

69. “That’s the whole point, darling, he said. Writers make things up.”

— Amanda Palmer

70. “If you want the world to pay for projects, you have to be able to display why you’re worthy.”

— Amanda Palmer

71. “Art pries us open.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

73. “We are human and our nature is to air.”

— Amanda Palmer

74. “Did I TED well? Am I fired?”

— Amanda Palmer

75. “Nobody ever sees me. Thank you.”

— Amanda Palmer

76. “People can understand a price tag, no matter what it’s stuck on. But some can’t understand a messier exchange of asking and giving – the gift that stays in motion.”

— Amanda Palmer

77. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

78. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

79. “Often it is our own sense that we are undeserving of help that has immobilized us.”

— Amanda Palmer

80. “Sometimes it was like Neil was from an alien planet, where people never asked for or shared anything emotional without deeply apologizing first. He assured me that he was simply British. And that we Americans, with all of our loud oversharing and need for random hugs and free admissions to people we’ve just met of deep, traumatic childhood wounds looks just as alien to them.”

— Amanda Palmer

81. “If your writing is good, if it resonates, if it connects the dots for anybody out there, the lovers will come, the haters will come, support will come – sometimes in the form of money, sometimes in the form of something less expected – and it balances.”

— Amanda Palmer

82. “Listening fast, and caring immediately, is a skill in itself.”

— Amanda Palmer

83. “I suppose I’m happy to sell my time and energy, but I’m not happy to sell my initial creative time.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

86. “Giving away free content, for me, was about the value of the music becoming the connection itself.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

89. “Asking is, at its core, a collaboration.”

— Amanda Palmer

90. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

92. “There’s a huge cloud of shame around art and business being seen as bedfellows.”

— Amanda Palmer

93. “I hate it when people don’t spend the night.”

— Amanda Palmer

94. “To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding.”

— Amanda Palmer

95. “I’ve apologized tons of times. The only thing I must not do is break the code of honesty and steady, forthright contact. You can fix almost anything by authentically communicating.”

— Amanda Palmer

96. “Your songs are good, Amanda. And I’m not just saying that. I stared at him in disbelief. I get given a lot of music, he continued. It’s like that on the road, you know, we get handed mountains of demo tapes every night. And they’re, you know, not always good. Your songs are good. I don’t know what your plans are. But I hope you keep going. I just wanted to say that.”

— Amanda Palmer

97. “Here is one successful recipe I have used to deal with haters, trolling, bullying, and other manifestations of critical voices. We all have them. Take the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment. Hold it in your mind. Now imagine the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment being aimed at the Dalai Lama.”

— Amanda Palmer

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

— Amanda Palmer

99. “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.”

— Amanda Palmer

100. “Limitations can expand, rather than shrink, the creative flow.”

— Amanda Palmer