Quotes from Marina Abramovic

If you experiment, you have to fail. By definition, experimenting means going to territory where you've never been, where failure is very possible. How can you know you're going to succeed? Having the courage to face the unknown is so important.

Don't even ask me why. I do not know, I have no answer to this insane behaviour.

In a world of Communist drabness and deprivation, I lived in luxury. I never washed my own clothes. I never ironed. I never cooked. I never even had to clean my room. Everything was done for me. All that was asked of me was to study and be the best.

We are trapped in technology because we are so unbelievably impressed by technology ... Technology is not the problem, our approach to technology is the problem.

Every party is the same, too many people, too little food, and you have to wait around. I'm extremely bored with parties.

He could not deliver the piece because he could not sit as long as I can, and the public divided us because they were talking about how I am stronger. It was terrible for our relationship because his punishment was being unfaithful.

When you are a young artist, you have no idea what you are doing. Every artist who says he knows, it is a lie.

Talking about performance is such a strange thing because it's so immaterial. We are talking about soft matter. We are talking about something that is invisible. You can't see it. You can't touch it. You just can feel it.

I'd always thought of art as something that was expressed through certain tools: painting, sculpture, photography, writing, film, music, architecture. And yes, performance. But this performance went beyond performance. This was life.

I always thought the more fucked-up childhood you have, the better artist you get, because you have more material to work with. I don't think anyone does anything from happiness. Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative.

In the performer's body, you don't care how you look. It doesn't matter if you're old, fat, beautiful, or ugly. It doesn't change anything. The only thing is your charisma and how you express your idea.

The brother of my grandfather was the patriarch of the Orthodox Church and revered as a saint. So everything in my childhood is about total sacrifice, whether to religion or to communism. This is what is engraved on me. This is why I have this insane willpower. My body is now beginning to be falling apart, but I will do it to the end. I don't care. With me it is about whatever it takes.

People who love you start to hate you when you become that rock star. Everybody is scrutinizing. They want you to be poor, to suffer, to struggle. I could not pay my electricity bill until I was 50, and now I can. I think this is something I should not be criticized for.

The more you fail, the more you understand what caused the failure, and you can make the next piece great.

I had so much fear of blood, and the first thing I did was to cut myself to see what happens. That's the only way to rebuild yourself.

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 by changing your breathing.

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

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.