Amanda Palmer Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

I don't think of myself as particularly cursed or blessed. I think I got dealt a set of cards, and I'm playing with them, sometimes in heels, sometimes in combat boots.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

The challenge is to just focus on what's actually happening, focus on the people who get it, and focus on the people who are listening.

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.

I hate being ignored.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I have a handful of really close relationships in my life and I depend on those people heavily to carry me through and to help me stay steady.

I get really fantastic results when I just get out of my own way.

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

If you come across an American artist right now who has no political opinions or is afraid of talking politics, be very concerned.

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

When you cannot joke about the darkness of life, that’s when the darkness takes over.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Nothing is crueller than children who come from good homes.

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

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

How do we let people pay for music?

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

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

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