Art & Creativity Quote by Laurie Anderson

Anderson is smuggling a whole aesthetic manifesto into a casual preference. When she says she likes books you can "hear" as much as "think about", she’s rejecting the old hierarchy where literature is brain-only and music is body-only. The line reads like a musician’s gentle provocation: if a text doesn’t trigger an inner soundtrack, if it can’t be performed inside your head, it’s missing a dimension of experience.

The phrasing matters. "Kind of" signals the DIY, anti-pretension posture she’s always worked from: experimental, yes, but not gatekept. "Hear" pulls reading toward voice, rhythm, breath, timing - the stuff Anderson lives in onstage. It’s also a swipe at the idea of the silent, solitary reader. She’s describing a hybrid attention, the way a good page can behave like a score: cadence, repetition, sonic texture. You don’t just decode meaning; you inhabit it.

Then she doubles down with "so graphic and visual", insisting that the best books don’t stay abstract. They project. They storyboard themselves. Coming from an artist associated with multimedia performance, this isn’t about liking "descriptive writing" in the high school sense. It’s about the mind as a screening room and a concert hall at once, about art that refuses to stay in one lane. The subtext is a defense of cross-pollination: literature that acts like film, like music, like performance - because contemporary consciousness already does.