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I Hate Repetition. Even When I Am Home And Have To Buy Milk, I Go A Different Way Each Time To Avoid Having A Habit Of Anything. Habits Are Really Bad. So To Me It Is Really Important To Live In What I Call The Spaces In-between. Bus Stations, Trains, Taxis Or Waiting Rooms In Airports Are The Best Places Because You Are Open To Destiny, You Are Open To Everything And Anything Can Happen.

-Marina Abramovic

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I Hate Repetition. Even

Marina Abramovic

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I Hate Repetition. Even When I Am Home And Have To Buy Milk, I Go A Different Way Each Time To Avoid Having A Habit Of Anything. Habits Are Really Bad. So To Me It Is Really Important To Live In What I Call The Spaces In-between. Bus Stations, Trains, Taxis Or Waiting Rooms In Airports Are The Best Places Because You Are Open To Destiny, You Are Open To Everything And Anything Can Happen.

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First Of All, To Do Performance Art, You Really Have To Give 100 Percent. I Only Know That I Have To Give 100 Percent And Then What Happens, Happens.

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We're Destroying The Planet, And The Planet Rebels.

Once You Live In New York, You Can't Live Anywhere Else. Living In Paris Is Like Going In Slow Motion. It's So Bourgeois. I Get So Bored.

I Had To Leave Some Traces. In The Beginning, I Would Give Complete Instructions To The Photographer. In The '70s, People Would Come To Photograph Your Work And You Would Just End Up With This Crazy Material That Had Nothing To Do With Your Work; Maybe I'd Pick Up Two Or Three Photographs That Were The Closest To The Idea. This Is Why When You Look At The '70s, You See Much Less Documentation And Really Bad Material. The Material Will Become Misleading To What The Piece Was.

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Western Culture Has More Need Because They're So Much More Degenerated. They're So Much More Hurt, And Misbalanced Completely.

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When I Was 14, I Thought I Looked Terrible. I Wore These Typical Slavic Shoes With Metal Bottoms So You Could Always Hear Me Coming And This Really Ugly Princess Skirt And Blouse With The Top Button Closed. I Had A Boy Haircut, A Baby Face Covered With Pimples, And A Really Big Nose.

Dali Lama Said, 'when You Open The Heart Of The Person With Humor, You Can Tell Him The Most Truth. But If You Tell Him Truth Without Humor, The Heart Closes.'

But What Is Art Other Than Revealing Human Nature?

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.

Performance Has To Be Mainstream Art. This Is What I'm Fighting For.

All My Inspiration Comes From Life. That's How It Never Stops, In A Way.

We Always Project Into The Future Or Reflect In The Past, But We Are So Little In The Present.

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.

The Only Thing I Have Learned Is To Find Strength In Yourself. No One Can Help You, No One Can Do Anything For You, You Have To Do The Work Yourself.

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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.

When You Have So Much Pain, You Think You Will Lose Consciousness. If You Say To Yourself, ‘so What, Lose Consciousness,’ The Pain Goes Away.

I Believe So Much In The Power Of Performance I Don't Want To Convince People. I Want Them To Experience It And Come Away Convinced On Their Own.

We Are Used To Cleaning The Outside House, But The Most Important House To Clean Is Yourself - Your Own House - Which We Never Do.

I Notice If I'm Too Fat Or If I'm Too Ugly Or There's Skin Hanging Or Whatever. When My Clothes Start Not Fitting, I Get Really Self-conscious About What I Eat.

From The Very Early Stage When I Started Doing Performance Art In The '70s, The General Attitude - Not Just Me, But Also My Colleagues - Was That There Should Not Be Any Documentation, That The Performance Itself Is Artwork And There Should Be No Documentation.

We Are Actually Living In A Million Parallel Realities Every Single Minute.

I Didn't Get Paid For Performances Most Of My Life. If I Did, I Would Be Billionaire Now, And I'm Not.

If You See A Renaissance Body, This Is Completely Ugly In This Time. Everybody Has To Be Skinny. But The Renaissance Body With Incredible Flow Of The Meat Everywhere, It Was Beauty.

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.

You See, What Is My Purpose Of Performance Artist Is To Stage Certain Difficulties And Stage The Fear The Primordial Fear Of Pain, Of Dying, All Of Which We Have In Our Lives, And Then Stage Them In Front Of Audience And Go Through Them And Tell The Audience, I'm Your Mirror; If I Can Do This In My Life, You Can Do It In Yours.

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Immaterial Art Is The Strongest Because There's No Obstacle; There's Just Energy, And I Believe In Energy.

To Me The Pain And The Blood Are Merely Means Of Artistic Expression.

I Never Say Serbia. I Always Say I Come From A Country That No Longer Exists.

Through Performance, I Found The Possibility Of Establishing A Dialogue With The Audience Through An Exchange Of Energy, Which Tended To Transform The Energy Itself. I Could Not Produce A Single Work Without The Presence Of The Audience, Because The Audience Gave Me The Energy To Be Able, Through A Specific Action, To Assimilate It And Return It, To Create A Genuine Field Of Energy.

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Because We Never Stop Silently Loving Those Who We Once Loved Out Loud

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The World Doesn't Need An Artist Who Shows Reality As It Is

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With Classical Ballet You Are Literally Injuring Yourself.

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.

Americans Don't Like European Movies.

I Am Obsessive Always, Even As A Child. 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.

Documentation Is Misleading, Because The Performance Is Dead. So The Very Early Works Were Not Documented At All.

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I Think If People Raise Their Consciousness And Find A Purpose, Everybody Will Be Helped.

I Have Found That Long Durational Art Is Really The Key To Changing Consciousness. On Such A Deep Level. Not Just The Performer, But The One Looking At It.

I Don't Know Anything About The Afterlife Because I Haven't Been There Yet.

You Create A Friendship On A Level That You've Never Done Before. The Basic Kind Of Experience Is To Basically Give Love To Total Strangers All The Time, And That Really Changed Everything In Me. And This Piece Transformed Me More Than Any Other One Before. I Saw My Entire Life Differently. What Do I Have To Do? What Is My Passion On This Planet? I'm Much More Focused Than I Ever Was Before.

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I Think The Role Of Artists In The Past Was Very Different. Artists Had Less Responsibility In Many Ways.

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The Hardest Thing To Do Is Something That Is Close To Nothing.

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.

If You Have To Do Durational Work, You Have To Train! No Bullshit. You Can't Do It For Three Months. You Can Do It For Five Hours, 10 Hours, And Then You Have Three Months Rest. If This Is Your Job, You Have To Be Flexible.

That's Something That I'm Trying To Do In My Work, To Send A Message To Western People. They're The Ones Who Are Completely Disconnected.

People Ask Me What Book Politicians Should Read. They Should Read The Life Of Mahatma Gandhi.

People Put So Much Effort Into Starting A Relationship And So Little Effort Into Ending One.

Artists Should Never Think Of Themselves As An Idol. Fame Is A Side Effect Of One's Work.

I'm Interested In Utopian Communities Of The Past. Many Of Them Didn't Survive And I'm Examining Closely The Reasons They Failed.

Happiness Comes From The Full Understanding Of Your Own Being.

I Hate Studio. For Me, Studio Is A Trap To Overproduce And Repeat Yourself. It Is A Habit That Leads To Art Pollution.

There Are Two Kinds Of Loss Of Hope, One Is The Feeling When Your Pulse Slows Down And You Are Going To Die, And There's Nothing Else Left. The Other Loss Of Hope Is When You're Living In A Country Which Becomes Insecure, And You Don't Know What The Future Is. That's Existential.

I Am Only Interested In The Ideas That Become Obsessive And Make Me Feel Uneasy. The Ideas That I'm Afraid Of.

The Complete Absence Of The Story - That Was The Best Thing About This Whole Thing, Because You Know That Nothing's Going To Happen And Everything's Going To Happen. It's Just The Gaze. You Create Your Own Zone.

We Always Want To Do Things The Way We Like, That's Why We Never Change.

In Real Life, You Just Work For The Ordinary Self, But In The Front Of Audience You Become The Superself. That's A Completely Different Thing.

I Want To Dominate The Man's World.

If We Go For The Easy Way, Then We Never Change.

For Me, The Most Difficult Piece Is The One I'm About To Make.

Because Of Technology, We Don't Develop Telepathy. We Don't Use Telepathy, But Use, You Know, The Mobile Phones. Why?

I Had Such An Intense Relationship To Every Person. I Still See People On The Street And We Lock Eyes, And Say "oh My God!" And We Just Kiss And Stay Like That And Sometimes Cry.

When I Was Young, I Couldn't Think About Ballet Because I Had To Focus On My Own Field. But Once You Secure Your Own Performance Area, You Can Indulge Yourself In Different Territories. Fashion Is One. And Ballet Is Absolutely A Fantasy, Because It Deals With The Bodies In A Different Way.

I Am Very Clear That I Am Not A Feminist. It Puts You Into A Category And I Don't Like That.

My Grandmother, When She Looked At American Movies, She Said, 'they're All The Same. In The First Scene Somebody Shoots Somebody And Then Everybody Makes Phone Calls.'

It's Okay That We're Not Perfect. It's Okay That We All Have Problems. It's Okay To Cry, To Show Emotions.

I Believe That Life Is Shorter; That Is Why We Have To Make Experience Longer.

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 Just By Changing Your Breathing.

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We Always Think Of Our Own Profit, But Not In Connection To Others.

I Am Pure Performance, And Robert Wilson Is Pure Theater.

Why Not Do Something Strange And Different For Once? Artists Can Do Whatever They Want!

When You Have A Nonverbal Conversation With A Total Stranger, Then He Cant Cover Himself With Words, He Cant Create A Wall.

We Wanted To Prove That I Am Not Just A Provocateur, As The Television Said [referring To A Fox News Clip Shown In The Film]. It's Challenging, But It's Not Just Challenging.

You Can't Choreograph Death, But You Can Choreograph Your Funeral.

Art Comes From Life, Not From The Studio

People Ask Why There Are So Few Female Artists Who Succeed. It's Because Women Are Not Ready To Sacrifice As Much As Men. Women Want A Man, They Want A Family, They Want To Have Children, They Want To Be Loved, And To Be An Artist. And They Can't; It's Impossible.

Most People Are More Comfortable With What Is Familiar. I’ve Spent My Life Doing The Opposite.

When Lady Gaga Says I Am Her Inspiration, You Reach Kids Between 12 And 18. Now I Am Like A Brand - Jeans, Coca-cola.

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We Make Such Terrible Mistakes With Visual Choices About Beauty.

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I Want To Die Consciously, Without Fear, And Without Anger. Three Things. I See My Friends Dying With Fear And Anger And It's Terrible. My Grandmother Kept Her Clothes Ready For 40 Years For Her Funeral. She Lived To 103! But She Kept The Clothes In A Cupboard. As The Styles Changed, She Changed The Clothes! I Think If I Start Now With My Funeral, It's Good.

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I Believe Stories Are Very Important To All Performances. The Life Story Of The Performer Shapes Their Work, And The Life Stories Of The Audience Alter How They Receive The Work, What They Read Into The Performer.

Television Is Completely Another Medium.

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From The Moment You Are Born, You Could Die. I Think As An Artist It Is Important To Meditate On That.

The Only Way To Change Consciousness And The World Around Us Is To Start With Yourself.

Cancer Is An Emotional Disease.

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Falling In Love

My Memoirs Are Full Of Humor, I Had To Change Jokes Because It Was A Little Too Dark.

Being An Artist Is Not Easy - I Have Always Said That To The Students I Have Taught Over The Years. It's A Huge Sacrifice.

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Galás Is A Great Artist With A Very Powerful Voice.

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You Know How You Feel Somebody Looking At You, And You Turn, And Somebody Actually Is? It's The Same At An Art Gallery. You're Looking At One Portrait, Turn Around, And There Is A Work Of Art Directly Behind You. Because It's All Energy. Every Single Thing Has Energy.

The Experience I Learned Was That … If You Leave Decision To The Public, You Can Be Killed… I Felt Really Violated: They Cut My Clothes, Stuck Rose Thorns In My Stomach, One Person Aimed The Gun At My Head, And Another Took It Away. It Created An Aggressive Atmosphere. After Exactly 6 Hours, As Planned, I Stood Up And Started Walking Toward The Public. Everyone Ran Away, Escaping An Actual Confrontation.

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You Know, Art Is Very Emotional Business. But Mostly It Becomes Not Emotional, The Fabric Of Commodity. It Becomes Business. It Becomes So Many Different Things. Because We Forgot There Was Emotions Involved.

My Work Is Immaterial. It's Not Painting, It's Not Sculpture, It's Emotions. I'm Giving You Something To Experience Yourself.

Experience Yourself

Most Artists Create Foundations Where They Put Their Own Work. Here I'm Not Putting My Own Work. I'm Just Creating The Chambers.

I Hate Repetition. Even When I Am Home And Have To Buy Milk, I Go A Different Way Each Time To Avoid Having A Habit Of Anything. Habits Are Really Bad. So To Me It Is Really Important To Live In What I Call The Spaces In-between. Bus Stations, Trains, Taxis Or Waiting Rooms In Airports Are The Best Places Because You Are Open To Destiny, You Are Open To Everything And Anything Can Happen.

In My Work I Have Complete Control, But About My Life, I Don't Want To.

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