Top 75 Marina Abramovic Quotes

I hate repetition. Even when I am home and have to buy milk, I go a different way each time to avoid having a habit of anything. Habits are really bad.

I can explain my work to the cleaner or the president; it’s all the same to me. I am very communist in this way.

I am thrilled Lady Gaga has helped to teach her audience about long durational work and performance art.

Unconditional love with someone you‘ve never met is a straightforward feeling that is so overwhelming and fulfilling.

I give people a space to simply sit in silence and communicate with me deeply but non-verbally.

I’ve been criticized by my generation, artists from the ’70s – and there’s nothing more tragic than artists from the ’70s still doing art from the ’70s – because I blur all these borders between fashion and pop.

I am very clear that I am not a feminist. It puts you into a category and I don’t like that.

First of all, to do performance art, you really have to give 100 percent. I only know that I have to give 100 percent and then what happens, happens.

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.

People have so much pain inside them that they’re not even aware of.

From the very early stage when I started doing performance art in the ’70s, the general attitude – not just me, but also my colleagues – was that there should not be any documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no documentation.

The entire aim of my work is to elevate the human spirit. We can put the human spirit down so easily.

Performance has to be mainstream art. This is what I’m fighting for.

The only theatre I do is my own. Somehow, my life is the only life that I can play.

If you see a Renaissance body, this is completely ugly in this time. Everybody has to be skinny. But the Renaissance body with incredible flow of the meat everywhere, it was beauty.

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.’

An artist has to look at the future, to see what we can do better.

You know, James Franco is one of the most interesting figures because he has no rules. He breaks all the borders.

We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute.

I don’t do husbands. I don’t do children.

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.

When people ask me where I am from I never say, ‘Serbia.’ I always say, ‘I come from a country that no longer exists.’

So many artists say they’re not aware of audience. For me is unbelievable.

When you have heartbreak, what’s important is that you don’t go halfway. Go all the way down. Don’t take pills that keep you in limbo. Cry out all the feelings. Then your own energy for life will put you up again. You become stronger.

I believe the artist has an obligation to society.

When you have a nonverbal conversation with a total stranger, then he can’t cover himself with words, he can’t create a wall.

There are good artists that have children. Of course there are. They are called men.

The hardest thing to do is something that is close to nothing.

To control the breathing is to control the mind. With different patterns of breathing, you can fall in love, you can hate someone, you can feel the whole spectrum of feelings just by changing your breathing.

I’m interested in asking: ‘What does feminine energy mean?’ I don’t have answers – I just have questions and interesting examples.

I am plenty lonely in hotel rooms.

When Lady Gaga says I am her inspiration, you reach kids between 12 and 18. Now I am like a brand – jeans, Coca-Cola.

All my inspiration comes from life. That’s how it never stops, in a way.

Theater is something that as a performance artist you have to hate.

When I was 14, I thought I looked terrible. I wore these typical Slavic shoes with metal bottoms so you could always hear me coming and this really ugly princess skirt and blouse with the top button closed. I had a boy haircut, a baby face covered with pimples, and a really big nose.

For me, performance is a holy ground. When I perform, I really step into a different state of consciousness.

Even now, I have traces of the good little girl. When I am not performing, for instance, I am really very quiet and ordinary.

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.

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.

A powerful performance will transform everyone in the room.

People ask why there are so few female artists who succeed. It’s because women are not ready to sacrifice as much as men. Women want a man, they want a family, they want to have children, they want to be loved, and to be an artist. And they can’t; it’s impossible.

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.

Most of the time, the artists are not supposed to wear the fashion. It is always seen as a vanity. But I think I don’t need to prove anything in my life. I can honestly say I love fashion and I can be many things at the same time.

Being an artist is not easy – I have always said that to the students I have taught over the years. It’s a huge sacrifice.

You know, art is very emotional business. But mostly it becomes not emotional, the fabric of commodity. It becomes business. It becomes so many different things. Because we forgot there was emotions involved.

I want to dominate the man’s world.

All the aggressive actions I do to myself I would never dream of doing in my own life – I am not this kind of person. I cry if I cut myself peeling potatoes. I am taking the plane, there is turbulence, I am shaking. In performance, I become, somehow, like not a mortal.

Why am I not feminist? Maybe because I come from a country where my mother ruled my life. I never felt in any way that I couldn’t achieve what I want.

In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible. The more I think about energy, the simpler my art becomes, because it is just about pure presence.

In America, everyone’s always hiding their age.

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.

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.

I had a very difficult relationship with my mother. She used to wake me up in the middle of the night if I wasn’t sleeping straight and was messing up the sheets. Now when I stay in hotels I sleep so straight they don’t even think I’ve used the bed.

I had three abortions because I was certain that it would be a disaster for my work.

To be in a magazine when you’re 20 is okay, but when you do it when you’re 65, it’s much more fun!

I have the greatest respect for Aborigine people, to whom I owe everything. The time I spent with members of the Pijantjatjara and Pintupi tribes in Australia was a transformative experience for me and one that has deeply and indelibly informed my entire life and art.

There’s not any subject the public doesn’t know about me. I don’t have secrets, and this is so liberating because this makes me free.

I face so much jealousy, and I am incredibly upset about it.

I am only interested in the ideas that become obsessive and make me feel uneasy. The ideas that I’m afraid of.

I change so many houses and places where I live; I change them like I change socks. I don’t have this absolute, kind of, how you say, attachment. My brother, if he just has to go to holiday to sleep in different bed, for him it is a disaster. I can sleep under this table or in a five-star hotel; I don’t care.

One of my aims was to be paid as well as a plumber. Plumber was better-paid than any performance artist who was always doing this for free. It is so important to make a good living from art. You know, John Cage, until he was 60, he couldn’t pay electricity.

Happiness comes from the full understanding of your own being.

My grandmother, when she looked at American movies, she said, ‘They’re all the same. In the first scene somebody shoots somebody and then everybody makes phone calls.’

To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is fake… The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.

From the moment you are born, you could die. I think as an artist it is important to meditate on that.

You can’t choreograph death, but you can choreograph your funeral.

The public is in need of experiences that are not just voyeuristic. Our society is in a mess of losing its spiritual centre.

Time is an illusion. Time only exists when we think about the past and the future. Time doesn’t exist in the present here and now.

I think 21st century should be art without objects.

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.

We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.

People in New York never have time for anything.

In real life, you just work for the ordinary self, but in the front of audience you become the superself. That’s a completely different thing.

Americans don’t like European movies.

Yes, I believe stories are very important to all performances. The life story of the performer shapes their work, and the life stories of the audience alter how they receive the work, what they read into the performer.