Creativity Quote by Laurie Anderson

There is a quiet defiance in the way Laurie Anderson frames awkwardness as a practiced gesture: head down, feet shuffling, memory wiped on command. She is not confessing a cute personality quirk. She is describing a survival tactic in a culture that treats praise as both currency and leash, especially for artists whose work is routinely misunderstood, overexplained, or flattened into a brand.

The choreography matters. “Hang my head and shuffle” reads like stage direction, which is pure Anderson: she turns inner life into performance, then shows you the seams. Compliments, in her telling, aren’t pure gifts; they come with an implied script: accept, smile, agree with the flattering story being told about you. Her refusal to “take” them well is a refusal to be narrated by someone else, to be pinned down as “genius,” “visionary,” “ahead of her time.” Those labels can be applause and containment at once.

The most revealing move is the desire to “immediately forget.” Forgetting isn’t modesty; it’s an attempt to keep the work metabolizing rather than fossilized. If you internalize praise, you risk repeating yourself to stay worthy of it. Anderson’s career has been built on staying slippery - crossing avant-garde, pop, tech, and spoken word without settling into a single identity. This quote protects that motion.

It also nods to the emotional math of public validation: compliments can feel like scrutiny with better lighting. Her response isn’t ingratitude; it’s a way of keeping the self from becoming a museum label.