Laurie Anderson Quotes

I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

Art is spiritual.

My Catholic faith is my life. Any artist, if he is to be faithful to how he perceives the world and to the nature of his creative gifts, cannot divorce the two. To create is to love. To love is to create.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I'm not turned away from the church through anger, although I have criticisms of it. It's through finding affirmation of life and illumination of life through creativity and art.

An artist is like a pig snouting truffles.

Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.

Beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.

Art is only a means to life, the life more abundant. It merely points the way.

Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

First thought is best in Art, second in other matters.

Life and art are not two different things.

You paint the way you have to in order to give. That's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving.

Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.

Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

The secret of life is in art.

The beginning of art is not reason. It is the buried treasure of the unconscious...that unconscious which has more understanding than our lucidity.

Acting isn't something that I think about very consciously, somehow that just doesn't work for me. I just kind of feel my way into it.

To admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

It can't be bought. It can't be taught. It must be caught.

I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.