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.

Cornelia Parker

Categorized in : Thought Television People Mother

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.

Cornelia Parker

want loss beauty

... 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.

Cornelia Parker

enough doe jobs

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

Cornelia Parker

renegades freedom artist

You make an open-ended proposition and the audience completes it somehow. That’s what you hope an artwork to be-a constantly living thing.

Cornelia Parker

living-things artwork audience

The main trouble with this civilized world isn't that we adventure too much, but that we fail to adventure enough.

Cornelia Parker

too-much adventure world

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.

Cornelia Parker

certain want trying

Once I started reinventing for myself what being an artist was - not going into a studio, but making things on my own terms in response to being out in the world - I started to really enjoy it... I realized that everything else for me was hell.

Cornelia Parker

hell artist world

Heaven grants the human being who has learned to live alone a deep measure of such rewards that verily would one hesitate to sacrifice such proved satisfactions, such rare unending possibilities of contentment for anything less than certainty more certain still.

Cornelia Parker

sacrifice contentment heaven

New York, forever the port of em- and de-barkation en route to Adventure.

Cornelia Parker

new-york forever adventure

There's something about being in the country that makes you stick out like a sore thumb ? you're an anomaly. But in London there's always someone wilder and woollier.

Cornelia Parker

thumbs anomalies country

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.

Cornelia Parker

health suffering want

Trout fishing is like any other sport. It is waste of words to try to give anyone who has never tried it any idea of what it means to land a five-pound trout on a gossamer leader.

Cornelia Parker

fishing sports mean

not only have children most certainly a right to their own ambitions, but their own lack of ambitions.

Cornelia Parker

lack-of-ambition ambition children

I hadn't the personality to be a long-term Success.

Cornelia Parker

term personality long

Cry down materialism all you will, surely one of the thoroughly satisfactory sensations of this world is to feel financially independent.

Cornelia Parker

cry independent world

I've done some collaborations which have ended up like Chinese whispers, but the most successful was with Tilda Swinton... Together we transcended our previous work and made something better together than we could have done apart.

Cornelia Parker

chinese successful together

When people asked to buy my work I always said no. I'd had this rather rarefied idea that I didn't want money going through my head while I was making work. But after the car crash I realized that none of my work was owned by anyone. After that, I grew up a bit.

Cornelia Parker

car people ideas

My iPhone has always been my sketchbook.

Cornelia Parker

iphone been always

I was involved in a serious accident driving in torrential rain at midnight in Cardiff. I was only doing five miles an hour, but because I couldn't see very well, I crossed a junction and collided with another car that was driving very fast. I ended up in hospital for six weeks with a shattered pelvis.

Cornelia Parker

driving car serious rain

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

Cornelia Parker

prime climate-change climate change