Top 80 Laurie Anderson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Technology is the campfire around which we tell our stories.”

— Laurie Anderson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

2. “Art is about paying attention.”

— Laurie Anderson

3. “History is an angel being blown backwards into the future.”

— Laurie Anderson

4. “You know, for every dollar a man makes a woman makes 63 cents. Now, fifty years ago that was 62 cents. So, with that kind of luck, it’ll be the year 3,888 before we make a buck.”

— Laurie Anderson

5. “The world is a strange and wonderful place.”

— Laurie Anderson

6. “Paradise Is exactly like Where you are right now Only much much Better.”

— Laurie Anderson

7. “You can do great things with low-tech stuff.”

— Laurie Anderson

8. “Last night, I had that dream again. I dreamt I had to take a test, in a Dairy Queen, on another planet.”

— Laurie Anderson

9. “Ninety percent of the people in the world end up with the wrong person. And that’s what makes the jukebox spin.”

— Laurie Anderson

10. “Performance art is about joy, about making something that’s so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can’t put into words.”

— Laurie Anderson

11. “You need to try to master the ability to feel sad without actually being sad.”

— Laurie Anderson

12. “Not many people care what you do. They care about what you do as much as you care about what they do. Think about it. Just exactly that much. You are not the center of the universe.”

— Laurie Anderson

13. “I’ve been trying to avoid goal-oriented behavior.”

— Laurie Anderson

14. “Freedon is a scary thing. Most people don’t want it.”

— Laurie Anderson

15. “Art can be engaged in the world without being specifically politically engaged.”

— Laurie Anderson

16. “The fewer expectations you have, the better.”

— Laurie Anderson

17. “The problem with prototypes is they don’t always work.”

— Laurie Anderson

18. “Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.”

— Laurie Anderson

Featured in: Reading Quotes

19. “If I’m confused, I just spend some time looking at the sky and falling into it. It’s not a meditation that anyone taught me, it’s something I’ve done my whole life, and liked doing, and it made me feel like nothing.”

— Laurie Anderson

20. “Don’t be afraid of anyone. Imagine your life if you’re not afraid of anyone.”

— Laurie Anderson

21. “Life goes by so fast. It’s really – and a lot of times things happen so fast you don’t know – how should I react.”

— Laurie Anderson

22. “All of nature talks to me – if I could just figure out what it’s saying – trees are swinging in the breeze. They’re talking to me. Insects are rubbing their legs together. They’re all talking. They’re talking to me.”

— Laurie Anderson

23. “You know the reason I love the stars is because we can’t hurt them: we can’t burn them, we can’t melt them, we can’t make them overflow, we can’t flood them or burn them up – so we keep reacing for them.”

— Laurie Anderson

24. “I always feel like if someone has stage fright, I really try and say, “Listen, these people want you to succeed, they want to have a good evening. They want to see something really great. They don’t want to see something crappy. They don’t. They want to be at something really special.””

— Laurie Anderson

25. “People only stutter at the beginning of the word. They’re not afraid when they get to the end of the word. There’s just regret.”

— Laurie Anderson

26. “When love is gone, there’s always justice.”

— Laurie Anderson

27. “Books are the way the dead talk to the living.”

— Laurie Anderson

28. “The only stuff I don’t like are Broadway musicals. I hate them. I don’t even like to talk about it. I can’t bear musicals.”

— Laurie Anderson

29. “Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.”

— Laurie Anderson

30. “I didn’t really understand that Vipassana is a relatively new form of Buddhism that was based on the storage of pain. So the idea is that every time you don’t scream, that’s your Buddhist side.”

— Laurie Anderson

31. “I have written a few children’s books. The first book that I wrote was for children. It was called “The Package”, and it was a mystery story in pictures. It had no words.”

— Laurie Anderson

32. “It’s a little hard to speak when you’re not supposed to move.”

— Laurie Anderson

33. “And there was a beutiful view But nobody could see Cause everybody on the island Was saying Look at me! Look at me.”

— Laurie Anderson

34. “I don’t care about being famous or having a lot of people go, “She’s really good.””

— Laurie Anderson

35. “I realized why movie scores are mostly strings, because it really frees your eyes to look around.”

— Laurie Anderson

36. “I see and write things first as an artist, second as a woman, and third as a New Yorker. All three have built-in perspectives that aren’t neutral.”

— Laurie Anderson

37. “The best thing about the term ‘performance artist’ is that it includes just about everything you might want to do.”

— Laurie Anderson

38. “A lot of the work in United States is highly critical of technology. I’m using 15,000 watts of power and 18 different pieces of electronic equipment to say that.”

— Laurie Anderson

39. “If there are bases on the moon, that would be the end of the moon as we know it.”

— Laurie Anderson

40. “My job is to make images and leave the decision-making and conclusion-draw ing to other people.”

— Laurie Anderson

41. “I think illusion is one of the most interesting things that I’ve found to think about. Just look at yesterday, and what you were doing, and how important it was, and how nonexistent it is now! How dreamlike it is! Same thing with tomorrow. So where are we living?”

— Laurie Anderson

42. “When you follow your thoughts and watch them attach to certain things, it makes certain things real and other things unreal, and you realize that this is all created by your mind.”

— Laurie Anderson

43. “I am a New Yorker, one; I’m an artist, two; I’m a woman, three.”

— Laurie Anderson

44. “Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That’s a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something.”

— Laurie Anderson

45. “Some friends of mine work in an office. They were getting really nervous from their coffee breaks, so they started to have wig breaks. They tried on wigs for 15 minutes. They found this relaxing. So that’s Wig Therapy.”

— Laurie Anderson

46. “I wanted to impress people because I was kind of a kid who was lost in the crowd – was sort of my, feeling about childhood was being part of a big family.”

— Laurie Anderson

47. “The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist – that it’s a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority.”

— Laurie Anderson

48. “I genuinely have never been in an audience where most people want that person to fail. I’ve never been in an audience like that, and I’ve never seen it as a performer. Only in my dreams, in which case they are always throwing tomatoes and going, “This is the most boring thing I’ve ever seen.””

— Laurie Anderson

49. “The audience creates its own personality, I’ve noticed, in the first five minutes. They will either be generous, funny, silly, withholding, academic, analytical, grudging. And I’m fascinated with how that gets constructed, because it happens right away.”

— Laurie Anderson

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

50. “I’m thrilled by the fact that I made something out of nothing. There it is! It wasn’t there before: there it is – I made it! That’s pretty powerful, and that’s the power that Buddhists give to every single person.”

— Laurie Anderson