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Wealth & Money Quote by Laurie Anderson

"I've never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn't made money with it"

About this Quote

Laurie Anderson makes the line land the way her best work does: deadpan, slightly futuristic, and quietly furious about how bureaucracy flattens a life. She starts with the innocent premise of “hobby,” a word that usually signals leisure, self-care, maybe a ceramics phase. Then she pivots to the IRS, yanking art out of the realm of identity and into the realm of accounting. The joke is structural: if you don’t profit, the state downgrades your practice into a pastime, as if meaning only counts after monetization.

The subtext is an artist’s origin story rewritten as a tax form. Anderson isn’t confessing she lacked direction; she’s pointing at the cultural pressure to justify time. In America, work is real, hobbies are cute, and art is tolerated until it needs resources. The IRS classification becomes a proxy for a broader logic that treats creativity as suspicious unless it behaves like a business. It’s a bureaucratic version of the question artists hear constantly: “But what do you do?”

Context matters because Anderson’s career lives at the intersection of avant-garde experimentation and public-facing success. She’s not an obscure romantic; she’s someone who eventually did “make money with it.” That makes the punchline sharper, not softer. It’s a reminder that even for a celebrated musician-performer, legitimacy can hinge on paperwork, not vision. The humor is protective armor, but the critique cuts: if institutions can rename your art a hobby, they can also decide it doesn’t deserve to exist.

Quote Details

TopicArt
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Anderson, Laurie. (2026, January 16). I've never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn't made money with it. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-never-really-had-a-hobby-unless-you-count-art-120144/

Chicago Style
Anderson, Laurie. "I've never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn't made money with it." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-never-really-had-a-hobby-unless-you-count-art-120144/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I've never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn't made money with it." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-never-really-had-a-hobby-unless-you-count-art-120144/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Laurie Anderson on art, hobby, and the measure of value
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About the Author

Laurie Anderson

Laurie Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is a Musician from USA.

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