Amanda Palmer Quotes

I nurture my close relationships like priceless lamps. That's part of why the job itself is inherently difficult and kind of a paradox, because you're out there touring and traveling and going a million miles a minute, but the things that are keeping you steady and stable can be really hard to nurture when you're going fast, and your relationships, which are the number one thing that help me through.

If you want the world to pay for projects, you have to be able to display why you're worthy.

Donald Trump is going to make punk rock great again.

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

I've always felt like an outsider across the board, since day one. The challenge has been to simply not pay attention to my outsider or insider status and just do the work and play the shows and connect with the people. And not even bother to play this game of keeping score, which is what destroys you.

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

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

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

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?

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.

I make the music that I want to make and make the show that I want to make. If you like it, you come. If you don't like it, you don't have to.

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.

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

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.

I feel like I've gotten to the point in my career and in my life where I can allow myself to write whatever comes into my head and not judge it too harshly.

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 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.

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

The minute I spend any energy defending myself, explaining myself, or in the worst case scenario, trying to please those who are criticizing me, I will, you know, just fall off a cliff.

You tour and you work hard and you take care of your fans and very real things lead to other real things. There's never been some fantastic fluke or break in my career, it has all been very slow and steady.

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.

The key is to just focus on the spots where the love is real, because you can just drive yourself crazy focusing on the negativity, focusing on the relationships that are irreparable and just aren't going to work, trying to convince the haters that you are indeed lovable. So much of that is wasted energy.

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

I don't try to make anybody outside happy.

It's fine for people to say, "If you can't stand the heat and if you can't stand the criticism, then just don't use the Internet"; unfortunately, that is not an option. The Internet is where we make our living and where we make our work, especially if we're independents and we cannot afford to not engage, because that's where our business is driving from. It's just not an option.

I do what I want. I try to be nice to everybody. When I fail, I try to apologize.

I wanted to feel like I could extend someone else's joy and not crush it, and that is the giant paradox nowadays of being a powerful woman: you want to live in a space of compassion and helpfulness and joy and expression, and the world is standing there, pointing the finger at you and telling you that you're greedy and domineering and attention-grabbing, and all you can do is shrug and just say, "Hopefully, someone out there understands and isn't misinterpreting."

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.

What I have found is, so much of that is like a Chinese finger trap: the more you play to the dark, the more you will get trapped in the dark, and if you just play to the light and focus on the people that don't misunderstand you and focus on the audience that does celebrate you and focus on the people who aren't trying to tear you down, all that other stuff eventually erases itself because it has nothing to feed on.

If I simply do what I've always done, it's never failed me.

I think the thing you're seeing now with the music industry is that the people who have tight-knit communities are now able to really hold each other up because of the internet tools. And the really top-down pyramid scheme of major labels and typical superstars isn't sustainable anymore because the system has collapsed.

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

We can only connect the dots we collect, which makes everything you write about you... your connections are the thread that you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.

I want to live in a world where Miley (or any female musician) can twerk wildly at 20, wear a full-cover floral hippie mumu at 37, show up at 47 in see-through latex, and pose semi-naked, like Keith & co, on the cover of Rolling Stone at 57 and be APPLAUDED for being so comfortable with her body.

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

I feel an extraordinary amount of sympathy for anybody working at a major label right now because their lives are over.

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

You know, there are so many snarky angry critics out there who are just sort of looking to tear down whoever is getting talked about.

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.

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.

I think I can define my entire life, virtuosity and business philosophy down to the core fundamental that I absolutely hate being told what to do. But like any artist or any human being out there, I desperately want to be loved, and I spend my entire life trying to balance those two facts.

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

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.

All of my music, my stage show, my personality, my blog, my twitter feed, anything that's made me me, and a huge part of why people like and respect me, is that I just don't spend much energy on that other stuff. It's not worth it. It's a losing battle too. You're just screwed the minute you engage.

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.

Men find powerful women so threatening, and finding a partner was starting to look laughable, because I would be really attracted to guys and they would just be so threatened and I didn't like feeling threatening, I didn't want to feel threatened, I didn't want to feel like I was towering over anybody.