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.
— Cornelia Parker
If you cut art from school, you're going to have a lot more looted shops.
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.
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.
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.
If people say, 'You can't do that,' you can be sure I will do my utmost to do it.
I have never fitted neatly into the arts section, I don't think.
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.
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.
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 like the idea of taking three-dimensional objects and making them two-dimensional so that they look like cartoons.
I definitely didn't want children, because my childhood was not a very happy time.
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.
I do 10 minutes of Pilates every morning if I'm in the mood.
At times, I've been incapacitated by anxiety and unhappiness. You really know what joy is if you have experienced the opposite.
I don't want my work to be issue-based. I want people to be able to read it in lots of different ways.
I never got to play as a child. All my spare time was spent working on my family's smallholding.
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'm not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill.
To make large, site-specific work as an artist is usually quite tortuous; there are so many boxes you have to tick.
A lot of my stuff just wasn't saleable. I still don't do private or corporate commissions. It becomes like interior design. I don't enjoy it. The process makes me feel physically sick.
You only get one life, so it seems to me you might as well do the things you want to do.
I think I was a late developer because I'd been stuck in the country and was a little bit shy and withdrawn.
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.
I am interested in the press and what they do.
The best ideas come out of getting lost.
Art historical reference is like learning to drive a car - you always know how to drive even though you're not analysing how.
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.
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.
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 need eight hours of sleep, but I never get it except at weekends.
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.
Maybe it's my Catholic upbringing - I grew up thinking that Armageddon was just around the corner - now I know it is, with global warming and all. I can keep it at bay by doing the work. It's a sort of reverse sympathetic magic. I'm always doing it so it doesn't happen to me.
Living in a warehouse is great - but after a while, you just want a garden.
Artists and scientists both think outside the box. They've got to come with genius experiments or ideas to expose the most interesting phenomena.
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.
I gave birth aged 45, which was a bit of a shock.
If you conceal things, they become more charged.
I was my father's sidekick, in a way. He was a very dominant, forceful character.
After leaving college, I was in a show called Sculpture by Women where I was asked to talk about my history of victimisation in art, and I genuinely didn't think I had been victimised. Although I obviously believe in a lot of the feminist aspirations, I was wary about being dragged down by the politics of it.
I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art.
I'm not very party-political, really; I am more strategic than that.
If I was prime minister, I would declare a state of emergency on climate change.
I don't particularly look at other artists when I'm working. But references do come into my work intuitively.
My mother became mentally unwell with schizophrenia when I was in my teens... We couldn't watch television because she thought the people on TV were sending her messages. She thought there were hidden cameras everywhere, so we had to have the curtains drawn.
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.
I don't skip meals, because I get blood sugary.
Jeremy Corbyn makes me angry. He seems vain.
My father was a very controlling man, and it was a big relief to get away from that.
