Quotes from Cornelia Parker

I didn't make any money out of my art until I was in my 40s, but it preserved my sanity and my freedom.

I always feel my work is a chemical reaction between me and the world, wherever I happen to be.

Violence is part of everybody's life, whether you like or express it or not. My work utilises all the energies that I have, and part of it is violent, and I'd rather it be out than in.

If I was prime minister, I would declare a state of emergency on climate change.

I'm trying not to go through that midlife dip that artists tend to have.

I started doing sculpture rather than painting. I was halfway through my degree, and I hadn't really done any introduction courses in sculpture... I'd missed all the technical stuff. I didn't really know how to weld or forge or carve or model. I'd sort of evaded all those technique classes, so I had no technique.

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.

Product design is fed by the avant-garde.

I have never fitted neatly into the arts section, I don't think.

I think design means, for me, almost when man, back in time, decided to do something conscious. You know... to shape something and make something different from just using things that were lying around. So whoever designed the wheel were onto a good thing.

You don't have to have angst to be an artist, but it's grist to the mill. If you want to explore the whole emotional spectrum in your work, it helps to have experienced intense emotions.

I don't drive for pleasure. It's purely to get from A to B.

If it is good enough for Prince William and Kate, why is studying art history not good enough for the masses?

At my degree show, someone said, 'It's nice, but it's very feminine.' I said, thank you, taking it as a compliment, but they obviously meant it as an insult.

What was the most important thing I learned from Chomsky? That capitalism compels us to work ourselves to death in order to stuff our houses with things we don't need. Perhaps this is one thing art can do: create a new aesthetic, one of austerity.

That's the problem with working and living in the same space - my studio is downstairs, so I often get distracted by domestic things.

I don't mind getting older; I just don't want to be in pain.

I think I'm a feminist, hopefully by example. I just feel it's important to do as much as I can as a woman, to the best of my ability.

I didn't really know what I was looking at when I first came across Man Ray's 'Dust Breeding,' his photograph of a work by Marcel Duchamp called 'Large Glass.' It looked like an aerial photograph or a view through a microscope.

There's only a couple of coffee cups I'll use, because I like the way they feel in my hand. I realise I've got lots of others, but I won't use them because I just don't like... the thickness of the ceramic is too much, or the glaze isn't right.

I had two great art teachers at school, but even they tried to tell me it was too hard a world. But that made being an artist even more attractive.

I have always had a bob haircut because my hair is so fine and doesn't like being long.

When I was a kid, my mother used to say, 'You always want to be different.' I couldn't work out what she meant. I was just trying to be myself.

To make large, site-specific work as an artist is usually quite tortuous; there are so many boxes you have to tick.