Quotes from Cornelia Parker

Art historical reference is like learning to drive a car - you always know how to drive even though you're not analysing how.

I don't particularly look at other artists when I'm working. But references do come into my work intuitively.

The idea of going off to an office every day and 'putting on my art hat' doesn't appeal.

As a working-class girl, receiving free school dinners, I studied art history. Having never had the chance to visit art galleries, I devoured the knowledge, and it has served me well as a practising artist.

I want to make work that reflects different times and processes.

I always love the court fool in Shakespearean times, in Henry VIII's time. The fool can say all kinds of stuff that the other people can't say, so I'm hoping I might take that role.

I take things that are worn out through overuse, that have become cliches - like the shed, a traditional place of rest and retreat - and I give them a more incandescent future.

When people listen to music, they don't worry about what it means like they do about art. Everyone's an expert on music, but with art, I always find I have to defend its existence.

I can consciously say I like squashing things because I saw 'Tom and Jerry' films or Charlie Chaplin in 'Modern Times.' That's true.

I try to avoid the 'art world' as much as possible. It's too much about fads and fashions - who's getting the best prices at auction and things like that.

Even though people think I am more of a conceptual artist, I am actually very intuitive. For me, it is still a matter of allowing things to naturally rise to the top of my mental pile, and then I make them.

My father was a very controlling man, and it was a big relief to get away from that.

The best ideas come out of getting lost.

Dust, in the end, settles on everything.

Paul Auster is my favourite writer, and I'm sure he'd be a very interesting person to share a journey with.

I was my father's sidekick, in a way. He was a very dominant, forceful character.

I do think there is a link between the accidental art the sciences produce and the deliberate art the artist creates, but I can't help feeling that the innocence of the accidental art of science has a power and curious beauty that artists are hard-pressed to match.

I don't want to feel like an ambulance chaser, but very often, when I hear about a fire, my first instinct is to make a piece of art out of it.

I am not a propagandist; my work has often had a political dimension but, hopefully, one that is not didactic and is open to interpretation.

My mother was German, and I was brought up with 'Struwwelpeter' stories, which are invested with all sorts of horrors waiting for you if you do the wrong thing.

Traditional conceptual art is very dry.

My iPhone has always been my sketchbook.

I was very physical as a child - we lived on a smallholding, and I was always outside making mud pies or building structures up trees.

A lot of my work has been about stuff I've been frightened of: cliffs, explosions, meteorites, that kind of stuff. I would have been this trembling blob of fear if I hadn't got into making art, which is a good way of deferring it.