Marina Abramovic Quotes
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It's very important that young artists push boundaries, because sometimes you have this urge to do something - like the impulsive and dangerous urges I had as a child - and if you don't follow through with it you might miss out on a developmental experience.
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The only theatre I do is my own. Somehow, my life is the only life that I can play.
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I really don't like art where you need to know so much theory to understand. If the theory is removed, it doesn't do anything. That means that this work is an illustration of theory, and I don't believe in the power of the work itself.
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I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris. It was rainy. It was all wrong. And I was thinking, 'God, she loved life so much.'
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For me, performance is a holy ground. When I perform, I really step into a different state of consciousness.
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Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.
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I don't know anything about the afterlife because I haven't been there yet.
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We make such terrible mistakes with visual choices about beauty.
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All my inspiration comes from life. That's how it never stops, in a way.
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Once you live in New York, you can't live anywhere else. Living in Paris is like going in slow motion. It's so bourgeois. I get so bored.
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In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible.
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You can't choreograph death, but you can choreograph your funeral.
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If you're a baker, making bread, you're a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you're not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you're an artist. So the context makes the difference.
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To really change the way society thinks, you have to give your entire being to it until there's nothing left.
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I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political - everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn't, then forget it.
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I am obsessive always, even as a child. On one side is this strict orthodox religion, on the other is communism, and I am this little girl pulled between the two. It makes me who I am. It turns me into the kind of person that Freud would have a field day with, for sure.
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I test the limits of myself in order to transform myself, but I also take the energy from the audience and transform it.
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In my work I have complete control, but about my life, I don't want to.
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People have so much pain inside them that they're not even aware of.
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Americans don't like European movies.
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Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.
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I am only interested in the ideas that become obsessive and make me feel uneasy. The ideas that I'm afraid of.
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Happiness comes from the full understanding of your own being.
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I don't do husbands. I don't do children.