Marina Abramovic's Reading List

"Nikola Tesla had such intuition about the future, and his ideas are more relevant today than ever before -- it's inspiring to read about his life."

"I return to it again and again in different stages of my life."

"Reading about the creative process from a scientific perspective, I found more similarities to my own work than I thought I would."

"Patti Smith's Just Kids was a huge inspiration for me. While reading it, I was so nostalgic about the simplicity and innocence of the art scene in the '70s, which I think she portrayed really well."

"When I was young, she gave me Letters: Summer 1926, about the three-way correspondence between Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetayeva and Boris Pasternak."

"Our developed world is bursting with screens and projections pumping out an incessant stream of what’s real, and what’s represented to be real. In this moment when we are witnessing the evolution of virtual reality, I find Baudrillard’s classic work of semiotics especially relevant. It has been hugely influential for me as a basis from which to explore important concepts and ethics around what our relationship with art and meaning will become. In the future, we will increasingly view the worl..."

"Reading about the creative process from a scientific perspective, I found more similarities to my own work than I thought I would."

"I’ll never forget a strange story by Camus, ‘The Renegade.’ It told of a Christian missionary who went to convert a desert tribe and instead was converted by them. When he broke one of their rules, they cut his tongue out."

"There is always something to learn from humans who have true wisdom. This collection of conversations with economists, physicists, doctors, and anthropologists is timeless, with parts that can be read again and again. And you don’t need to read it from beginning to end. I open the book with closed eyes and point to sections at random to read. For me any part of this text can answer my deepest questions."

"Nikola Tesla had such intuition about the future, and his ideas are more relevant today than ever before — it’s inspiring to read about his life."

"This is one of my favorite books of all time. I discovered it in my early 20s, and I have never stopped learning from it."

"People ask me what book politicians should read. They should read the life of Mahatma Gandhi."

"Kafka’s unfinished novel features so many lives and so many different moments from the development of our society. Its lessons can be applied to the cultural and political moment we live in right now."

"I like many poets, but these three simple lines by Arakida Moritake (1473-1549) always stay with me as a reminder of the temporality of our existence: An orphaned blossom / returning to its bough, somehow? / No, a solitary butterfly."

"Brilliantly researched, this book transports you vividly into the world of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, a mixed-race nobleman and soldier during the French Revolution who inspired his son, Alexandre Dumas, to write The Count of Monte Cristo . It is a must-read."

"Reading Rilke, on the other hand, was like breathing in pure poetic oxygen. He spoke of life in a different way than I’d ever understood it before. His expressions of cosmic suffering and universal knowledge related to ideas I would find later in Zen Buddhist and Sufi writings. Coming upon them for the first time was intoxicating."

"Extreme narratives fascinated me. I loved reading about Rasputin, whom no bullet could kill—Communism mixed with mysticism was very much part of my DNA."

"Patti Smith’s Just Kids was a huge inspiration for me. While reading it, I was so nostalgic about the simplicity and innocence of the art scene in the ’70s, which I think she portrayed really well."

"The best book I’ve ever received as a gift was actually the best gift I ever received from my mother, too. When I was young, she gave me “Letters: Summer 1926,” about the three-way correspondence between Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetayeva and Boris Pasternak. Three brilliant minds that had never met, all writing sonnets and passionate letters to each other for four years, eventually falling in love with each other through this correspondence. Seeing this love triangle unfold through actual..."

"Since I live in America, my appetite for dark Balkan humor is greater than ever — especially in this moment of incredible political correctness in comedy."