The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help Quotes

“I knew what I needed, but asking for specific emotional things felt impossible and obnoxious. He was a human being. He should just instinctively know how to take care of an emotionally exhausted, sick, post-abortion wife. He ought to just know, I thought. I shouldn’t have to fucking ask.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Here is one successful recipe I have used to deal with haters, trolling, bullying, and other manifestations of critical voices. We all have them. Take the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment. Hold it in your mind. Now imagine the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment being aimed at the Dalai Lama.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“People can understand a price tag, no matter what it’s stuck on. But some can’t understand a messier exchange of asking and giving—the gift that stays in motion.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Given the opportunity, some small consistent portion of the population will happily pay for art.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“in truth, feeling love from a distance is just lonely. Maybe even worse than no love at all, because it feels so unnatural.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“We have the power to help each other.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Asking for help with shame says: You have the power over me. Asking with condescension says: I have the power over you. But asking for help with gratitude says: We have the power to help each other.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Everybody out there is winging it to some degree, of this we can be pretty sure.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Asking for help requires authenticity, and vulnerability.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Brené Brown, a social scientist and TED speaker who has researched shame, worthiness, courage, and vulnerability, recently published a book called Daring Greatly, which I fortuitously picked up at a Boston bookstore when I was just beginning to write this book. I was so blown away by the commonalities between our books that I twittered her, praising her work and asking her if she would give me a foreword for this book.3 She writes: The perception that vulnerability is weakness is the most widely accepted myth about vulnerability and the most dangerous. When we spend our lives pushing away and protecting ourselves from feeling vulnerable or from being perceived as too emotional, we feel contempt when others are less capable or willing to mask feelings, suck it up, and soldier on. We’ve come to the point where, rather than respecting and appreciating the courage and daring behind vulnerability, we let our fear and discomfort become judgment and criticism.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Here’s the thing: all of us come from some place of wanting to be seen, understood, accepted, connected. Every single one of us wants to be believed. Artists are often just…louder about it.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Right at the intersection of Mass Ave and JFK Street, it hit me. I stopped short, stunned by the realization of what had just happened: I can do this as a job. I can do this every day that it’s warm and not rainy. If I just made thirty-eight dollars in an hour, I can work three hours and make about a hundred dollars in a day. I don’t have to scoop ice cream anymore. I can make my own schedule. I don’t have to have a boss. Nobody can ever fire me. I WILL NEVER HAVE TO HAVE A REAL JOB AGAIN. And technically? I never really did.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“with the same delight that we took as children in seeing a face in a cloud, grown-up artists draw the lines between the bigger dots of grown-up life: sex, love, vanity, violence, illness, death.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Your songs are good, Amanda. And I’m not just saying that. I stared at him in disbelief. I get given a lot of music, he continued. It’s like that on the road, you know, we get handed mountains of demo tapes every night. And they’re, you know, not always good. Your songs are good. I don’t know what your plans are. But I hope you keep going. I just wanted to say that.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“I WILL NEVER HAVE TO HAVE A REAL JOB AGAIN. And technically? I never really did.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“You can fix almost anything by just authentically communicating.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Dita Von Teese, a star in the contemporary burlesque scene, once recounted something she’d learned in her early days stripping in LA. Her colleagues—bleach-blond dancers with fake tans, Brazilian wax jobs, and neon bikinis—would strip bare naked for an audience of fifty guys in the club and be tipped a dollar by each guy. Dita would take the stage wearing satin gloves, a corset, and a tutu, and do a sultry striptease down to her underwear, confounding the crowd. And then, though forty-nine guys would ignore her, one would tip her fifty dollars. That man, Dita said, was her audience.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Listening fast, and caring immediately, is a skill in itself.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“the value of the flower would increase the moment I handed it over to its buyer—and as we held each other’s gaze, I could feel the value rising, like an emotional stock ticker. The value of the gift rises in transit, as it is passed from hand to hand, from heart to heart. It gains its value in the giving, and in the taking. In the passage.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“You must prepare the ground. If you’re going to be asking one day, you need someone to ask who is going to answer the call. So you tend to your relationships on a nonstop basis, you abide by the slow, ongoing task, going out there like a faithful farmer, landing on the unseeable bamboo shoot. And then, when it is time—whether you’re asking a bunch of people to preorder your album, or asking one person to hold back your hair while you’re puking—someone will be there for you.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Giving away free content, for me, was about the value of the music becoming the connection itself.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“It made me consider one of the reasons I loved my fanbase so much: they are wholly independent and have their own unassailable, discerning tastes. They weren’t looking to me as a leader to follow blindly, there to dictate their choices. They were looking to me as a connector, a coordinator, which was the role I wanted.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Sam was about to travel to Asia with her boyfriend and she was fretting about what her backers would think if she released some of her new songs while she was 'on vacation'. She was worried that posting pictures of herself sipping a Mai Tai was going to make her look like an asshole.

What does it matter? I asked her, where you are whether you're drinking a coffee, a Mai Tai or a bottle of water? I mean, aren't they paying for your songs so that you can... live? Doesn't living include wandering and collecting emotions and drinking a Mai Tai, not just sitting in a room writing songs without ever leaving the house?

I told Sam about another songwriter friend of mine, Kim Boekbinder, who runs her own direct support website through which her fans pay her monthly at levels from $5 to $1,000. She also has a running online wishlist of musical gear and costumes kindof like a wedding registry, to which her fans can contribute money anytime they want.

Kim had told me a few days before that she doesn't mind charging her backers during what she calls her 'staring at the wall time'. She thinks this is essential before she can write a new batch of songs. And her fans don't complain, they trust her process.

These are new forms of patronage, there are no rules and it's messy, the artists and the patrons they are making the rules as they go along, but whether these artists are using crowdfunding (which is basically, front me some money so I can make a thing) or subscription services (which is more like pay me some money every month so that I can make things) or Patreon, which is like pay per piece of content pledge service (that basically means pay me some money every time I make a thing). It doesn't matter, the fundamental building block of all of these relationships boils down to the same simple thing: trust.

If you're asking your fans to support you, the artist, it shouldn't matter what your choices are, as long as you're delivering your side of the bargain. You may be spending the money on guitar picks, Mai Tais, baby formula, college loans, gas for the car or coffee to fuel your all-night writing sessions. As long as art is coming out the other side, and you're making your patrons happy, the money you need to live (and need to live is hard to define) is almost indistinguishable from the money you need to make art.

... (6:06:57) ...

When she posts a photo of herself in a vintage dress that she just bought, no one scolds her for spending money on something other than effects pedals. It's not like her fan's money is an allowance with nosy and critical strings attached, it's a gift in the form of money in exchange for her gift, in the form of music. The relative values are... messy. But if we accept the messiness we're all okay.

If Beck needs to moisturize his cuticles with truffle oil in order to play guitar tracks on his crowdfunded record, I don't care that the money I fronted him isn't going towards two turntables or a microphone; just as long as the art gets made, I get the album and Beck doesn't die in the process.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“Did I TED well? Am I fired?”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“he’d believed for a long time, deep down, that people didn’t actually fall in love. That they were all faking it.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“It is really hard to love people unconditionally when they can hurt you.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“They all told me I had a fear of intimacy, but I vehemently disagreed; I craved intimacy like a crack addict.
The problem was that I craved intimacy to the same burning degree that I detested commitment.
Being a statue was such a perfect job.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“physical pain and intense experiences of social rejection hurt in the same way… Neuroscience advances confirm what we’ve known all along: emotions can hurt and cause pain. And just as we often struggle to define physical pain, describing emotional pain is difficult. Shame is particularly hard because it hates having words wrapped around it. It hates being spoken.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

“And with the same delight that we took as children in seeing a face in a cloud, grown-up artists draw the lines between the bigger dots of grown-up life: sex, love, vanity, violence, illness, death.”
― Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help