Cornelia Parker Quotes

#1. 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.

Cornelia Parker

#2. 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.

Cornelia Parker

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

Cornelia Parker

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

Cornelia Parker

#5. Even a magician must have relations,

Susanna Clarke

#6. If you need ownership and responsibility from core workers, patriarchy can't get you there.

Peter Block

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

Cornelia Parker

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

Cornelia Parker

#9. 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 ...

Cornelia Parker

#10. The dumber people are, the more they feel the need for a broad set of shoulders they can lay their head against.

Michael Haneke

#11. You don't have to aim to be the best of everything, thinking that one day you're going to be the top of the world; I don't think it exists.

Laura Mvula

#12. I'm not clumsy; just accident prone.

Daniel Radcliffe

#13. 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.

Cornelia Parker

#14. I'm not defending him; I have no idea why he's made the choices he has. But ... I can't help but feel sorry for him. Because one day he's going to open his eyes and realize that he's made the biggest mistake of his life.

Emma Chase

#15. When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.

George Saunders

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

Cornelia Parker

#17. 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.

Cornelia Parker

#18. Obedience is the key to every door.

George MacDonald

#19. 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.

Cornelia Parker

#20. Manhood is taking care of your family and being able to bless other people. Not yourself - but whether you can bless other people.

Magic Johnson

#21. 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.

Cornelia Parker

#22. 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.

Cornelia Parker

#23. 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.

Cornelia Parker

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

Cornelia Parker

#25. Christianity has no shrines to visit, no dusty remains to venerate, no tombs at which to worship.

Billy Graham

#26. I don't understand how an adult can write those last two sentences and not want to kill themselves for being so despicable.

Harvey Pekar

#27. I asked my girlfriend, 'Will you marry me?' She said, 'We'll have to ask my father.' So we had a seance and Jack Ruby says, 'Hello!'

Emo Philips

#28. Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to read further in it; he was under none to begin. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.

Neville Cardus

#29. 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.

Cornelia Parker

#30. 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.

Cornelia Parker