Amanda Palmer Quotes

Going to the office of some stranger and waiting in a line, in a hallway, with five other guys who look just like you, waiting your turn to go in and embarrass yourself, and then waiting around for feedback, which never comes. I really like that. For a young artist, it seems like the perfect thing to be doing, humiliation, over and over and over and over. Which I'm sure can't be the way that some people look at it, but I thought that was so great. The point of it is if you make your own stuff you don't have to deal with other people's bullshit.

An artist wears his work in place of wounds.

I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because 'you aren't going to make a living doing that.' I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.

I unfortunately do suffer for my art.

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

You're demonstrating your own skills in a vulnerable way when you draw.

Our wishes are our most reliable mirror, and the black-and-white movies I'm most drawn to are about artists who suffer because art is a noble thing; suffering is such a small price to pay for the imagination.

I've always been making music, but I sort of went under the radar. I kind of disappeared... I was never really that comfortable with the music industry. I loved the idea of being able to express myself creatively - but the rest of it never really sat well with me.

I have always found writing pleasant and don't understand what people mean by 'throes of creation.'

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

The desire to create literature leads to frights, grunts, and coy looks.

I sometimes wish desperately that I could write like someone else, be someone else. No one particularly. Just if I could put the pen down on paper and suddenly come out in a totally different way.

Writing is like a contact sport, like football. Why do kids play football? They can get hurt on any play, can't they? Yet they can't wait until Saturday comes around so they can play on the high school team, or the college team, and get smashed around. Writing is like that. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it!

I initially felt shy about doing painting because I wasn't a professional painter. I almost felt like I didn't deserve to paint. But I have gradually adopted a different kind of attitude about this.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

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.

You perform the thing that you made, that's inside of you, and to subject that to any kind of scrutiny is terrifying. It's still terrifying to me.

The thing I wondered about so much as a young artist, particularly when things weren't going well and I was really struggling, was, "Will I know when to give up? Will I know when I've suffered enough rejection? Will I know when to get out?"

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

When you write songs you're commenting on love, you're commenting on sex, relationships, whatever it is that you decide to write about it. And I've wanted to write about politics or spiritual ideas for years.

Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments… you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.

If you worry about how good the art is, you're never going to make your own art.