Quotes from Cornelia Parker

I don't skip meals, because I get blood sugary.

People often want the big dramatic works, not the smaller quieter ones, but I don't worry about how it fits together anymore; I just have to do it. I feel compelled to make a work: it's like an itch I have to scratch, and once it's been scratched, it goes away.

Artists and scientists are very close. They always have been, but I think we've just been divided out over the last few centuries into specialisms. Leonardo da Vinci was drawing helicopters and all kinds of things. We're artificially divided. I think we're closer than we think we are.

Driving a steamroller over an old trumpet or a teaspoon is no more destructive than taking a chisel to a lump of marble already torn from the landscape. But people don't see it that way because marble is considered noble.

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.

My parents were always doubtful about my making a living as an artist. Even when I was up for the Turner Prize, my mum suggested I apply for a curator's job.

I'd love to do something like put a piece of moon rock on Mars and a piece of Mars on the moon, a sort of reverse archaeology.

I never got to play as a child. All my spare time was spent working on my family's smallholding.

I think my work is like a spiral: you keep coming back on yourself, but you're at a different place. It's like reading 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' every five years. You realise that some things have caught up.

I don't read the art mags. I read the newspapers.

At times, I've been incapacitated by anxiety and unhappiness. You really know what joy is if you have experienced the opposite.

I think it's quite obvious my work is made by a woman, because I have never wanted to make anything that is not ephemeral. But I definitely want to be thought of as an artist first.

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.

I'm not very party-political, really; I am more strategic than that.

Being a sculptor who uses found objects, all the objects I use in my work have been designed by other people. So I'm tweaking them in some way by squashing them or throwing them off cliffs! Then I formalise my damage by suspending them or arranging them in some kind of way. So I'm using other people's design in a way, so I'm an 'un-maker.'

I was selling bric-a-brac in Portobello and Camden Market. I love objects. But I was embarrassed by the idea of collecting, so I began using these things in my art.

If people say, 'You can't do that,' you can be sure I will do my utmost to do it.

Jeremy Corbyn makes me angry. He seems vain.

I think I was a late developer because I'd been stuck in the country and was a little bit shy and withdrawn.

I think your subconscious knows far more than your conscious, so I trust it.

... 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.

My work has threads of ideas from all over the place. I try to crystallise them in something simple and direct that the viewer can then take where they want.

Beauty is too easy. Often in my work, I take beautiful objects and do extreme things to them so that they are overlaid with something a bit more sinister and violent.

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