I feel lucky to be getting older. The fact that I made it to 30 and then 40 was big enough. So I can't get too down on getting older; otherwise, it kind of undoes everything I've fought for.
— Sam Taylor-Johnson
One of the few times I saw my mother cry was when Lennon died, and the other time was when Elvis died.
I have a massive phobia for schedules and calendars. I need people to tell me where I need to be. I can't bear to see it in black and white. I think it's a fear of being pinned down.
I struggle if I have chaos around me, but at the same time, if I don't have it, I'm uncomfortable. It's a strange thing: If I don't have chaos, I create it.
After I left college, I went to work at the Royal Opera House in London, which became a real catalyst for me because it made me realize that I was interested in cinema and in the way life is thrust at you. So I started making films.
I understand what it is to go through emotional trauma and retreat and go into the world of your imagination. I understand how art and music can be a place of safety in a world of reinvention.
I think people are frightened of women making big decisions.
Having children is exciting. Life puts the past into perspective.
My childhood had its challenges, like everyone's. It imbued me with certain things and took away others. It made me very determined.
I find that I put my body in my work when I am at a particularly difficult or joyous point because I want to feel that moment.
Money scares me, and it always has done. I've got a childish concept of money, and I like to keep it that way in the sense that I don't like to think about it.
I feel like I've lost 10 years of my life to cancer.
I've made lots of big decisions in my life that have shocked people.
I suppose I didn't cry in all the cancer crap stuff because I felt I couldn't lose the battle, and part of the battle was holding myself together.
I seize all opportunities with two hands. Everything that's happened to me has taught me to live in the moment as much as possible.
I love karaoke. I love maudlin country ballads. In another life, I'd be Loretta Lynn.
I remember as a kid not ever wanting to have friends around to my house because it was, for want of a better description, disheveled.
I went to Goldsmith College of Art in London in the '80s and there I made sculptures, but the objects had nothing to do with how I was thinking. I was making beautifully sanded wooden boxes!
I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.
I've been through plenty in my life where I've really had to focus on the day ahead... because, as I know, the future is, you know, whatever the future is... Once you've stared mortality that hard in the face, you really seize the day.
I never thought of having cancer as something that was unfair. I just braced myself and tried to get through it.
I felt giving birth was the most creative act of all my creative acts - literally creation!
Relationships can go wrong very simply, very quickly, and when you have children you become more aware of relationships around you.
My mum has lived in Australia for 22 years now, and we have a rocky relationship. But at the same time it's one I want to maintain. I need her to be my mum. The relationship took a lot of rebuilding.
I took on cancer like I take on everything - like a mission and a job to accomplish.
I almost never cry, and it's something I don't like about myself. I sometimes try and make myself cry. Sometimes, when I'm in pain, I say if I could just cry it would make it so much easier.
I hate rats. I had a pet rat to try and overcome it. I even gave him mouth-to mouth resuscitation when he had a heart attack. But I couldn't conquer it.
Sorry, there's nothing like a screaming baby to make a mother twitch.
My work is made on lines similar to those of a film production. A lot of my work is kind of bureaucratic, endlessly phoning up people, trying to find the cameraman and the lighting man, because I am a total technology-phobe, quite helpless with equipment.
I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film.
I've always lived my life fearlessly, and what I want to do with my life, I do.
I always say, and I truly believe this, that my work is three steps ahead of me. I have an idea for something and I tend to feel like it's leading me and I'll follow the process through, and it's not until after I've seen it that I truly understand why I'm doing this.
I wanted to become an artist because it meant endless possibilities. Art was a way of reinventing myself.
I feel the art world in New York has a stronger following than Britain. If you go to a New York art district on a Saturday morning, it will be so busy with families and openings - art is much more ingrained in the culture.
When you're no longer ill, and everyone's gotten over the fact that you've had cancer, that core of steel doesn't go away, and then I had to find other channels for it.
I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.
In my life, I've never really listened to when people start forming opinions on how you should be doing things.
