Laurie Anderson Quotes

I believe that who we are, and consequently the work that we make, whether we're visual artists or writers or journalists or filmmakers, is a projection of where we were born, what's been withheld or lavished upon us, our color, our sex, our class. And everything we do in life to some degree is a reflection of that context.

I grew up in Chelsea on 22nd Street... I am really a native New Yorker.

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.

I live my everyday life as a person, and I react to my photos from a certain distance. When I look at a photo, I detach myself and look at it as a product - not as me, Isabella.

You can go down the list of great artists and kind of understand that they are products of their environment. Whether it's U2 or Henry Rollins or myself or Johnny Lydon, they're gonna be products of their environment.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

One can't paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.

I'm a New Yorker, you know.

The family you were raised in, the time period you were born in, and the part of the country you're in absolutely shape your view on sex, which shapes a huge part of anybody's personality.

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

I still think of myself really as a New Yorker.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

I'm from Sacramento, and I have no idea what growing up in a city is like.

I always feel like my writing is consistently influenced by everything I watched and listened to growing up, so it's just this crazy collage of everything, you know.

Within my immediate creative community, I would say gender is something that I've always been interested in and always talked about.

I'm from Asia. You can hear it in my voice, and you can see it in my face, and that's primarily my perspective.

I'm a director first and foremost, and I hope that the fact that I'm female is just one of the many things that informs my unique perspective on the world.

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

When alone I am not aware of my race or my sex, both in need of social contexts for definition.

I am an artist and a writer, and I do think that one always places oneself in the picture to see where one fits.

I think my stance and my way of life is my most important art.

I don't talk politics and I don't talk philosophy or anything like that, but if you look at my work, you might get an expression of me as a person.

I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass.