Laurie Anderson
Computers are so deeply stupid. What bother me most when they talk about technology is they don't realize how much more exciting their minds are. That machine is stupid. And boring. It does just a few things and then it'll crash. People think, 'I am on the Net, I am in touch with the world'. Wrong! The point is how we work, not how machines work.Collection: Stupid
When you meet a man who is broken, pick him up and carry him. When you meet a woman who’s broken, put her all into your arms. Cause we don’t know where we come from … we don’t know where we are.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Confused
Last night, I had that dream again. I dreamt I had to take a test, in a Dairy Queen, on another planet.Collection: Dream
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?Collection: Thinking
If you're a young artist, wondering what to call yourself, consider 'multimedia artist.' It's so vague. Then, no one can say, 'Hey, how come you're a jazz person, and you're making a pop opera?Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Real
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 themCollection: Hurt
. . . I wrote a letter to Thomas Pynchon asking, Can I have your permission to try to make an [adaptation] of your book? And I had no idea that he would answer me, because he's pretty elusive. But he did send a letter back that said, Yes, you can do that - as long as the only instrument in the opera is a banjo. I thought, That's an interesting way of saying No.Collection: Book
When I was four, I was a kind of sky worshipper. I would look at the sky, and I wanted to evaporate into the sky - I loved the sky. I loved looking at the trees, just because they touched the sky.Collection: Sky
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Buddhism
Dogs don't just like us, they love us, and they admire us. The big reason they admire us is we invented cars. They're like, "Yes, we get to go somewhere!" Go somewhere faster, with their head out the window, and their ears, like, "Yes! Yes!"Collection: Dog
Paradise Is exactly like Where you are right now Only much much Better.Collection: Heaven
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.Collection: Coffee
Freedon is a scary thing. Most people don't want it.Collection: Freedom
They say that Heaven is like TV... a perfect little world, that doesn't really need you.Collection: Perfect
Books are the way the dead talk to the living.Collection: Book
My job is to make images and leave the decision-making and conclusion-draw ing to other people.Collection: Jobs
Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.Collection: Long
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."Collection: People
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.Collection: Talking
I know a lot of people who have weird specialties that are not taught in schools; they're things that you learn in life.Collection: School
The best thing about the term 'performance artist' is that it includes just about everything you might want to do.Collection: Artist
We want to dedicate our music tonight to the great opportunity that we all have to begin to truly understand the events of the past few days and to act upon them with courage and with compassion as we make our plans to live in a completely new world.Collection: Courage
You know, I can see two tiny pictures of myself And there's one in each of your eyes. And they're doin' everything I do. Every time I light a cigarette, they light up theirs. I take a drink and I look in and they're drinkin' too. It's drivin' me crazy. It's drivin' me nuts.Collection: Crazy
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Thinking
So many things have happened to me in my life that I could be phobic about.Collection: Happened
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.Collection: Silly
And there was a beutiful view But nobody could see Cause everybody on the island Was saying Look at me! Look at me.Collection: Islands
It's a little hard to speak when you're not supposed to move.Collection: Moving
I am a New Yorker, one; I'm an artist, two; I'm a woman, three.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Kids
You need to try to master the ability to feel sad without actually being sad.Collection: Being Sad
There are plenty of ways you can play the game of fighting and really seem to be fighting without going for the jugular.Collection: Fighting
Audiences, whether they're seeing a film or a reading or whatever it is, a concert, they decide very quickly what kind of show it is, and then they judge it. They judge the rest of the thing by whether it conforms to their rules for what a good symphony orchestra would be.Collection: Reading
I wanted to stay hooked because it was the first time I've been part of the tradition where forgetting was just fine. You do it, you try, you forget, you fail.Collection: Trying
No single person who has ever lived will be able to tell you what happens. Period. Nobody's right and nobody's wrong.Collection: Able
I don't care about being famous or having a lot of people go, "She's really good."Collection: People
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."Collection: Dream
I really trust audiences as having excellent taste, for the most part.Collection: Taste
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.Collection: Children
Shining in the midnight moonlight, while the King sings love me tender.Collection: Kings
Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Buddhist
I kind of didn't believe the doctors when they came over and they said you're not going to be able to walk again. I'm sorry to tell you this. I thought who is this guy? I just was so impatient with the whole thing. I knew I was going to walk again. I knew that I was going to do that.Collection: Sorry
What happens when you're in a crash is you join a crash club, and you talk endlessly about your crash because you don't want to bore your friends with it. And they've heard about the crash so many times.Collection: Clubs
I always wonder when people have any kind of spiritual and meditative practice especially if it's one designed in part to help them cope with things that seem unmanageable and to cope with something like death, if they're able to maintain that practice and maintain the equanimity at the time of death whether it's, you know, that person's or that person's loved one.Collection: Spiritual