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The mind is crazy thing. To be focused is the most difficult thing.
Marina Abramovic -
People have so much pain inside them that they're not even aware of.
Marina Abramovic
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Happiness comes from the full understanding of your own being.
Marina Abramovic -
You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important - in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.
Marina Abramovic -
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.
Marina Abramovic -
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.
Marina Abramovic -
I'm interested in utopian communities of the past. Many of them didn't survive and I'm examining closely the reasons they failed.
Marina Abramovic -
Performance has to be mainstream art. This is what I'm fighting for.
Marina Abramovic
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You can't choreograph death, but you can choreograph your funeral.
Marina Abramovic -
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.
Marina Abramovic -
One of the most wonderful things for me is to watch somebody else perform, where I am the audience - I love this more than ever.
Marina Abramovic -
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.
Marina Abramovic -
I used to have a recurring dream where I was at a party in a country house, surrounded by the same people each evening. Everyone would be singing and dancing and after a while I came to know the people; though, of course, they never really existed.
Marina Abramovic -
Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.
Marina Abramovic
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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.
Marina Abramovic -
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.
Marina Abramovic -
I don't do husbands. I don't do children.
Marina Abramovic -
To really change the way society thinks, you have to give your entire being to it until there's nothing left.
Marina Abramovic -
I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.
Marina Abramovic -
I don't know anything about the afterlife because I haven't been there yet.
Marina Abramovic
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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.
Marina Abramovic -
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.'
Marina Abramovic -
In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible.
Marina Abramovic -
I test the limits of myself in order to transform myself, but I also take the energy from the audience and transform it.
Marina Abramovic