Quotes from Marina Abramovic

If you learn to be a psychoanalyst, and you're working as a psychoanalyst, your job is in that context. 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. And my context is art.

If you are not passionate in life, you can't be passionate in art.

Ideas can come anytime, anywhere, while I am making this gazpacho or going to the bathroom. I am only interested in the ideas that become obsessive and make me feel uneasy. The ideas that I'm afraid of.

If you're a woman, it's almost impossible to establish a relationship. You're too much for everybody. It's too much. The woman always has to play this role of being fragile and dependent. And if you're not, they're fascinated by you, but only for a little while. And then they want to change you and crush you. And then they leave.

The function of the artist in a disturbed society is to give awareness of the universe, to ask the right questions, and to elevate the mind.

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.

My first paintings were of my dreams. They were more real to me than the reality I was living in--I didn't like my reality. I remember waking up, and the memory of my dreams was so strong that I would write them down, and then I would paint them, in just two very particular colors, a deep green and a night blue. Never anything else.

When I think about my life, the early works, you know, always you learn as a young artist to have a style you can follow, a certain line. But I didn't do that. I had this enormous urge to make different works. And some of them, I didn't see any kind of connection. I didn't know where I'm going. But now, looking 45 years back, everything had perfect sense. It's like a straight line.

I just want to create situations where people forget time.

I've never really had a studio. A studio makes you lazy and comfortable, and you repeat yourself.

I expose myself to life, and from that, ideas come as a surprise. I totally dismiss the ones that are pleasant and easy. I'm only interested in the ones that really disturb me and that I get obsessed about. They're what bring me to new territory.

Because I did an event with Jay Z, she said I'd killed performance art. But who made these rules?

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.

When I read a book, everything around me stopped existing. All the unhappiness in my family--my parents' bitter fights, my grandmother's sadness at having had everything taken away from her--disappeared. I merged with the characters.

If we go for the easy way, then we never change.

I think the absence of love in the family and the need to create a family with art world and public is really strong. Psychoanalyst would say it's a clear picture! But it didn't appear like that in the beginning.

I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I'm naked.

In the beginning, I was a painter, but the moment I stood in front of the public and expressed my ideas using my body as the object and subject of the work, immediately it was clear that this is my best medium. I struggled with acceptance; my early career was hell. But it took me all these years to create a foundation so that performance would become accepted in the same way as photography and video. You have to believe that you're right, even if everybody believes you are wrong.

I made a tape recording of a bridge collapsing and I wanted to play it suddenly and very loudly when people were walking over a big bridge in Belgrade. The council forbid it. Their imagination is tiny; mine is big. I want always to shake everything up.

You know how many friends become enemies and how many enemies become friends -- it's just changing all the time. So many people presume you are something, then they meet you and become proper friends, and the ones who really knew you can't stand it, for whatever reason.

When you're 50, the best thing to do is dance the Argentinean tango.

It was a big base of my performance art ... the idea of here and now ... not something that's happening in the past or the future. It's always happening. It's always now.... Only what matters is the present.

I didn't take no for an answer. I've always been like that. If I think in my gut that I'm right, I do it. You have to have this kind of conviction. Otherwise, I would have given up many years ago. After the 1970s, all the performance artists started doing paintings and sculptures or architecture; performing was far too hard. I'm so happy I didn't give up.

When you get to my age of course you know you have to confront death. I want to die without anger, without fear and consciously, and these three things are not easy.