Laurie Anderson's Quotes

I'm an average enough person to point to the things I've gotten to see that are awe-inspiring.

I've been trying to avoid goal-oriented behavior.

It's good to take a longer view and think, What would I really like to do if I had no limitations whatsoever?

It's just such a great miracle when things do work, and they work for such a wild variety of crazy reasons.

My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.

One of the things I learned from working on the Olympics was, the world does not need another big multimedia show.

Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better.

People are really suffering these days. There's a lot of corporate triumph and a lot of personal despair as they wonder what are they working for.

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.

Something that has so much power must have life. Instruments have life.

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.

The problem with prototypes is they don't always work.

The thing that's characteristic of my performance is that I literally do drag the whole studio onto the stage.

The world is a strange and wonderful place.

You can do bigger and bigger things. For what?

You can do great things with low-tech stuff.

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.

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.

My work is more about trying to ask good questions and not trying to come up with big shows. Every fashion company is doing that, every car company is doing that.

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.

When love is gone, there's always justice. And when justice is gone, there's always force. And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi, Mom!

I've never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn't made money with it.

I'm not usually where I think I am. It's kind of spooky.