Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York during the 1970s, making particular use of language, technology, and visual imagery. She became widely more known outside the art world in 1981 when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth5 June 1947
CityGlen Ellyn, IL
CountryUnited States of America
. . . I wrote a letter to Thomas Pynchon asking, Can I have your permission to try to make an [adaptation] of your book? And I had no idea that he would answer me, because he's pretty elusive. But he did send a letter back that said, Yes, you can do that - as long as the only instrument in the opera is a banjo. I thought, That's an interesting way of saying No.
I have written a few children's books. The first book that I wrote was for children. It was called "The Package", and it was a mystery story in pictures. It had no words.
I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual.
Books are the way the dead talk to the living.
People who were born alone are defined by feelings like "Who's gonna be with me when I die? Who will ever understand me? Will I always feel so alone? Maybe if I write a book..." and you forget that that doesn't help you so much.
Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.
I see that it has huge benefits for us understanding how and why diversity changes over time and how that might be applied to evaluate potential effects of future environment and climate changes,
The thing that's characteristic of my performance is that I literally do drag the whole studio onto the stage.
You can do bigger and bigger things. For what?
My job is to make images and leave the decision-making and conclusion-drawing to other people.
One of the things I learned from working on the Olympics was, the world does not need another big multimedia show.
When I was a teenager, I dreamed abbout escaping. I was lucky. I succeeded.
When you think of the Caribbean today, you think of clear blue warm water, ... Probably about 12 million years ago, it was more like the eastern Pacific; it was a bit cooler. There was greater seasonal change in temperatures, and there were more nutrients around.
The promoter called and said, 'What should we do?' People were calling to say they were sure it was canceled, but I thought that to have a public event that night would be a good idea.