I have the greatest respect for Aborigine people, to whom I owe everything. The time I spent with members of the Pijantjatjara and Pintupi tribes in Australia was a transformative experience for me and one that has deeply and indelibly informed my entire life and art.

Marina Abramovic

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.

Marina Abramovic

Time Future Us

Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.

Marina Abramovic

Work Great Death

Unconditional love with someone you've never met is a straightforward feeling that is so overwhelming and fulfilling.

Marina Abramovic

War Love You

In theater, blood is ketchup; in performance, everything's real.

Marina Abramovic

Very Up Thing

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.

Marina Abramovic

Work Art You

When you have heartbreak, what's important is that you don't go halfway. Go all the way down. Don't take pills that keep you in limbo. Cry out all the feelings. Then your own energy for life will put you up again. You become stronger.

Marina Abramovic

Life Art Your

To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. 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.

Marina Abramovic

Art You Us

Why am I not feminist? Maybe because I come from a country where my mother ruled my life. I never felt in any way that I couldn't achieve what I want.

Marina Abramovic

Life Why Where

I have this exercise that I propose to everybody: Hug a tree and complain for a minimum 15 minutes. Be yourself, and do something that you really feel deeply.

Marina Abramovic

Yourself Yours Your

We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.

Marina Abramovic

Future Ways Way

We are used to cleaning the outside house, but the most important house to clean is yourself - your own house - which we never do.

Marina Abramovic

Yourself Yours Your

I don't have tattoos, I have scars!

Marina Abramovic

Car Too Tattoos

An artist should not fall in love with another artist.

Marina Abramovic

Love Art Wit

I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris. It was rainy. It was all wrong. And I was thinking, 'God, she loved life so much.'

Marina Abramovic

Sad Love Life

It's so easy to do things you like. But then, the thing is, when you're afraid of something, face it; go for it. You become a better human being.

Marina Abramovic

You Things Thing

Happiness comes from the full understanding of your own being.

Marina Abramovic

Happiness Your You

Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.

Marina Abramovic

Happiness Good You

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.

Marina Abramovic

War Society Art

After my performance 'The Artist is Present (2010)' at MoMA in New York, many scientists became interested in why so many people who sat across from me began to cry. I was incredibly moved by this experience also, and was very curious to know what happens in our brains when we spend time not talking, just looking at one another.

Marina Abramovic

Time Mom Experience

When you have a nonverbal conversation with a total stranger, then he can't cover himself with words, he can't create a wall.

Marina Abramovic

Anger You Words

All my inspiration comes from life. That's how it never stops, in a way.

Marina Abramovic

I am only interested in the ideas that become obsessive and make me feel uneasy. The ideas that I'm afraid of.

Marina Abramovic

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.

Marina Abramovic

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.

Marina Abramovic

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

Marina Abramovic

To really change the way society thinks, you have to give your entire being to it until there's nothing left.

Marina Abramovic

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.

Marina Abramovic

Good art is never made in studio. Good art I make in life.

Marina Abramovic

People put so much effort into starting a relationship and so little effort into ending one.

Marina Abramovic

I believe that life is shorter; that is why we have to make experience longer.

Marina Abramovic

The entire aim of my work is to elevate the human spirit. We can put the human spirit down so easily.

Marina Abramovic

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.

Marina Abramovic

You can't choreograph death, but you can choreograph your funeral.

Marina Abramovic

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.

Marina Abramovic

When I taught art, I was always asked, 'How do you know you're an artist? What makes you an artist?' And to me, it's like breathing. You don't question if you breathe; you have to breathe. So if you wake up in the morning, and you have to realize an idea, and there's another idea, and another, maybe you are really an artist.

Marina Abramovic

We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute.

Marina Abramovic

Today, our attention is less than the television advertisement. We're looking at six or seven problems constantly. We're living in the disturbed societies of cities. I think modern technology is one of the worst things human beings have invented.

Marina Abramovic

I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political - everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn't, then forget it.

Marina Abramovic

Yes, 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.

Marina Abramovic

I hate studios. A studio is a black hole. I never use a studio to work. It's very artificial to go to a studio to get new ideas. You have to get new ideas from life, not from the studio. Then you go to the studio to realize the idea.

Marina Abramovic

I have always staged my fears as a way to transcend them.

Marina Abramovic

My mother and father were partisan national heroes: I learned sacrifice and discipline from them and that a private life is not as important as the message you want to leave.

Marina Abramovic

Woody Allen has a wonderful line: 'Today I'm a star. What will I be tomorrow? A black hole?' That's very important to know - that you have the moment, then you lose the moment. You have to see your chances, you have to take them, and you also have to see when you don't have chances to take.

Marina Abramovic

I am thrilled Lady Gaga has helped to teach her audience about long durational work and performance art.

Marina Abramovic

I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.

Marina Abramovic

I'm not feminist, by the way. I am just an artist.

Marina Abramovic

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.

Marina Abramovic

When people ask me where I am from I never say, 'Serbia.' I always say, 'I come from a country that no longer exists.'

Marina Abramovic

It's very important that young artists push boundaries, because sometimes you have this urge to do something - like the impulsive and dangerous urges I had as a child - and if you don't follow through with it you might miss out on a developmental experience.

Marina Abramovic

I have the greatest respect for Aborigine people, to whom I owe everything. The time I spent with members of the Pijantjatjara and Pintupi tribes in Australia was a transformative experience for me and one that has deeply and indelibly informed my entire life and art.

Marina Abramovic