Amanda Palmer
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Tears
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.Collection: Sleep
You are an artist when you make someone feel something deep and unexpected.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Challenges
It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!Collection: Art
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Writing
Those who can ask without shame are viewing themselves in collaboration with-rather than in competition with-the world.Collection: Competition
Nothing is crueller than children who come from good homes.Collection: Children
I'm bisexual, but it's not the sort of thing I spent a lot of time thinking about. I've slept with girls; I've slept with guys, so I guess that's what they call it! I'm not anti trying to use language to simplify our lives.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Sexy
When you connect with people, they want to help you.Collection: People
How do we let people pay for music?Collection: People
I'm still trying to express my truth, my place in the world, my belief.Collection: Trying
Meditation, especially for people who dont know very much about it and think its this very hippy dippy thing, can really be powerful, terrifying even, as it lifts the rug up on your subconscious and the dust comes flying out.Collection: Powerful
There's really no honor in proving that you can carry the entire load on your own shoulders. Andit's lonely.Collection: Lonely
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.Collection: Jobs
If you come across an American artist right now who has no political opinions or is afraid of talking politics, be very concerned.Collection: Artist
If I were a guy, it would be, you know, just a different set of problems I have to carry along.Collection: Guy
I feel like if I were to play the game completely and just get myself in a giant bottle of nail polish and put myself on display, I would feel like I had somehow cosmically lost. I feel like I'm taking a bunch of the ingredients and using some of them but not all of them and shuffling around and making people think I'm doing my job.Collection: Jobs
One thing about being a performer is you're not just doing an intellectual job behind a desk; you're out there performing and being looked at, being assessed for really superficial stuff.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Jobs
I remember being a teenager and being really impressed by "let's sit around and b*tch" people, and I have so little time for those people nowadays.Collection: Teenager
How you sound. How you look. Are you fat? Those are things that could be really irritating.Collection: Sound
The cool thing too, as you get older, you get way better at identifying who's an ally and who isn't. And who has good, positive, "let's make all this sh*t better and let's try to have fun and fix sh*t" people as opposed to "let's sit around and b*tch and berate" people.Collection: Fun
While we're over here blocked up in our departments and locked up in our own judgments and dealing with our own crazy problems, they're over there dealing with equivalent problems. One of the things that I am so frightened by lately is that men are having just as difficult a time striking a balance as we are.Collection: Crazy
We are human and our nature is to air...Collection: Air
Comparing yourself to the people like you, comparing yourself to the people who aren't like you, looking at how many records you've sold, looking at the venue size you're selling out. None of that can even remotely measure how happy you are.Collection: People
I kind of rely on my artist friends to make my physical music worth buying by having them all come together and create beautiful artwork that everyone is gonna want to own to support my record.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Writing
I think I've always felt as a band and as a musician and a music business person, I've always felt like an outsider, period.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Games
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Crazy
I never wanted to grow a thicker skin; I felt a real sense of pride in my thin skin, and in a weird way, I still do, because it's my thin skin that allows me to empathize with other people. It's the thing that allows me to create vulnerable art. It's the thing that allows me to create other feelings and make songs that actually grab people and touch people. I feel like I've spent my life fighting that thicker skin because I don't want to become an embittered asshole.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: One Direction
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.Collection: Men
The impulse to connect the dots - and to share what you've connected - is the urge that makes you an artistCollection: Artist
Sometimes I have a terrible feeling that I am dying not from the virus, but from being untouchable.Collection: Change