Amanda Palmer

“Neil Gaiman swooped into my life though another friend, Jason Webley, who knew we were fans of each other's work and introduced us via email. Neil and I, like me and Ben, just hit it off instantly.”

“Asking for help with shame”

“I get so many ideas for songs, but I'm so seldom disciplined enough to sit down and crank them out.”

“Thank God my best friend's a therapist.”

“I think to say that meditation is helpful to artists is true and it's great, but it's also essentially helpful to any kind of process of, just, life.”

“I suppose I'm happy to sell my time and energy, but I'm not happy to sell my initial creative time.”

“You can’t ask authentically and gracefully without truly being able to accept “No” for an answer. Because if you’re not truly willing to accept “No” for an answer, you’re not really asking, you’re demanding — you’re begging. At least, that’s how I’ve come to understand asking.”

“Every album is just a greatest hits of whatever songs are on a pile when I go in to make a record.”

“The pattern's laid out on the bedWith dozens of colors of threadBut you've got the needleI guess that's the point in the end”

“I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is just access to the possibility of freedom that you don't have to be totally depressed and enslaved by your own environment.”

“And another local journalist wrote an op-ed wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far. Wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far?To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of understanding.”

“​Whatever we are given is supposed to be given away, not kept.”

“My number-one goal is to never feel like I'm strictly defining myself. The minute I feel like I'm doing that as anything - as theatrical, as feminist, as songwriter - I feel like the minute I name it, I'm stuck in a box.”

“I've always been a creative workaholic. I have never had a period of my life where I didn't have at least half a dozen projects going on at once.”

“There's something advantageous about being a woman in rock versus, say, a woman in chemistry or construction. There's definitely a built-in sexism across the board, but I think you're afforded a degree of freedom in rock because, historically, the rules have been flexible.”

“Meditation, especially for people who don't know very much about it and think it's this very hippy dippy thing, can really be powerful, terrifying even, as it lifts the rug up on your subconscious and the dust comes flying out.”

“You get the feeling that on a lot of days the audience for most music would kind of rather not be faced with the artist, especially because we've been educated to think that the artist are these special creatures are otherwordly and aren't like us.”

“There's no blueprint; getting married doesn't make you boring, having kids doesn't make you boring, having money doesn't necessarily have to make you boring.”

“The world needs actual excitement and emotion more than it needs cool people.”

“I'm a massive fan of David Lynch and 'Twin Peaks.'”