Quotes from Marina Abramovic

I give people a space to simply sit in silence and communicate with me deeply but non-verbally.

Documentation is misleading, because the performance is dead. So the very early works were not documented at all.

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

From the moment you are born, you could die. I think as an artist it is important to meditate on that.

Performance is there, and if you are not there in that moment it happened, it just stays in the memory. It's so immaterial and something this immaterial is very difficult to collect. Its difficult to buy, its how we can buy immaterial art.

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.

If I'm not nervous, I'm nervous. You never know how people are going to receive the work.

Cancer is an emotional disease.

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.

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.

With classical ballet you are literally injuring yourself.

All the aggressive actions I do to myself I would never dream of doing in my own life - I am not this kind of person. I cry if I cut myself peeling potatoes. I am taking the plane, there is turbulence, I am shaking. In performance, I become, somehow, like not a mortal.