Cornelia Parker Quotes

The biggest handicap in research is an ability to think outside the box. The handicap is being encumbered by all the conventional wisdom in a given field.

I wouldn't know how to think inside the box because I don't even know where it is. I wouldn't know how to do it any other way.

The people who do make big discoveries are the ones who somehow manage to free themselves from conventional ways of thinking and to see the subject from a new perspective.

When trying to innovate, most people stop after 10-15 possibilities, failing to recognize that their first ideas are usually the most obvious ones.

Sometimes a crazy idea can make something special.

Be creative. Use unconventional thinking. And have the guts to carry it out.

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.

I think being a little nuts is helpful.

I've got a feeling that with the best coppers - and in fact the best people in any field of work - what sets them apart is a maverick quality. People who are not afraid to bend the rules in order to achieve the universally desired end.

If all I hired were cake decorators, our cakes would just look like cakes that people decorate. We do astounding work at Charm City Cakes and to do that you need people who think in astounding ways. Artists just think in different ways.

I like taking up challenges. I prefer working with scripts that are different and veer from the tried and tested. So far, it's always worked.

To me, unconventional thinking is approaching a problem and asking, 'Why not? Why can't something be done?' If someone can't give me a good reason why you can't do something, I find a way to do it.

What I often do is just think of a completely obtuse thing to do, almost the wrong thing to do. That often works because you start a different approach, something no one has tried.

No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful.

Whenever I try to do something, I figure out what other people aren't doing or how can I do it different or how can I stand out.

I've never taken any issue off the table for lack of suitability. Only for lack of imagination.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

I don't want a lot of guys like me who played the game. Quite frankly, I want blank canvases; I want people to come in with new ideas. I don't want the biases of their own experiences to be a part of their decision-making process.

We have to think big. We have to imagine big, and that's part of the problem. We're letting other people imagine and lead us down what paths they want to take us. Sometimes they're very limited in the way their ideas are constructed. We need to imagine much more broadly. That's the work of a writer, and more writers should look at it.

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

To see things differently requires you to be wired a little differently.

It's like that Simpsons joke - they're filming a cow in a movie and they go, 'OK, we'll tape a bunch of cats together to make a cow', and it's like, 'Why don't you just use a cow?'. For some reason that is novel - like, 'Oh, my guitar sounds like a piano and now if I can just get my piano to sound like my guitar'.

By the way, intelligence to me isn't just being book-smart or having a college degree; it's trusting your gut instincts, being intuitive, thinking outside the box, and sometimes just realizing that things need to change and being smart enough to change it.