Cornelia Parker Quotes

I don't want it all to be pretty - it's a combination of loss and gain. Things are born, live and hang in limbo. That's what life's about.

You make an open-ended proposition and the audience completes it somehow. That’s what you hope an artwork to be-a constantly living thing.

There's such a freedom about being an artist... You're not accountable - you're this renegade thing.

... rarely if ever does one feel sure one knows enough to go ahead with much of anything new. You bank on faith and courage and the ability to learn on the job.

The main trouble with this civilized world isn't that we adventure too much, but that we fail to adventure enough.

Once I started reinventing for myself what being an artist was - not going into a studio, but making things on my own terms in response to being out in the world - I started to really enjoy it... I realized that everything else for me was hell.

There's only a certain amount of works you can make, so you have to make only the ones you really want to make. It's all about trying to be as productive as possible.

If I'm not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill. It niggles when things get out of my control.

Heaven grants the human being who has learned to live alone a deep measure of such rewards that verily would one hesitate to sacrifice such proved satisfactions, such rare unending possibilities of contentment for anything less than certainty more certain still.

When people asked to buy my work I always said no. I'd had this rather rarefied idea that I didn't want money going through my head while I was making work. But after the car crash I realized that none of my work was owned by anyone. After that, I grew up a bit.

New York, forever the port of em- and de-barkation en route to Adventure.

not only have children most certainly a right to their own ambitions, but their own lack of ambitions.

There's something about being in the country that makes you stick out like a sore thumb ? you're an anomaly. But in London there's always someone wilder and woollier.

Cry down materialism all you will, surely one of the thoroughly satisfactory sensations of this world is to feel financially independent.

I've done some collaborations which have ended up like Chinese whispers, but the most successful was with Tilda Swinton... Together we transcended our previous work and made something better together than we could have done apart.

Trout fishing is like any other sport. It is waste of words to try to give anyone who has never tried it any idea of what it means to land a five-pound trout on a gossamer leader.

I hadn't the personality to be a long-term Success.