Cornelia Parker Quotes

There's something really magical about having a child - it's like permission to begin again, start over, reevaluate some things, check yourself. Recognize yourself. And that's kind of what happened with me - I realized, in a few places, I was going down the wrong path.

As a writer, I have to go to a different place now. As a person... I want to step off whatever this stage is that I have been given. The argument has been made, the battle remains to be fought - and that requires a different set of skills.

You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.

Honestly speaking, I don't like my films. When I watch them, I see a lot of scope for improvement, so if I were to see any of my films, like 'Dhoom,' I might say... 'It would have been better if...' or 'had it been...' and this is all about evolving.

'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.

Each championship has felt different in its own way, I guess because I've been in different place of my life; I've gone through different things.

You could ask yourself, 'Hey, when you were 20, are you the same person?' You're not. You may have the same values, you might look a little older, you might have some things that are the same, but your heart, everything about you, starts growing, changing - good or bad. It just depends on how you approach life.

I've said things that, now, I wish I hadn't said because times have changed and like the me of 15-20 years ago made a joke that I wouldn't make today because I - just because I look at the world differently now, you know. And because the world is different now. And, you know, it's all part of a maturation process, I think, for everybody.

Reading Ehrenreich is good for the soul.

Well, I Am... I Said was a very difficult song, very difficult because I really had to spend a lot of time thinking about what I was before the song was written.

The writing is therapeutic for me, it's an introverted process, I'm really inside my head. It's a really obsessive process. The live show, though, is the opposite. It's an extroverted process. It pushes me to connect with people, and so it pulls me out of my head and just pulls me out of myself.

Pictures you have taken have an influence on those that you are going to make. That's life!

Ego is something that everybody, creative especially, has to grapple with. You need enough ego to keep going but not so much ego that you're deaf or blind, that you're making a mistake and can't fix the course.

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

I think there's a lot of evolution that's happened in intangible ways, in terms of how I think about the work or how I plan it out.

I don't really go back over my old shows, but I'll see them occasionally, mostly I want to go back and change things about the character as I look at them.

Writing about craft has forced me to think more about my own writing technique, and to break down my process in ways that have been enormously helpful to me.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

I'm constantly striving to break through to something new. You try to maintain a neutral approach to your work, and not be too hard on yourself.

But you have to look at your work with an honest critical eye. Work on the things that you need work on. Scare yourself. Surprise yourself. If you don't like the way it's going, you have complete control over changing the course. That's one of the best things about doing this.

You think you're developing and getting better and then you see something you did years ago. Looking at your early work.. sometimes it has a depth that surprises you.

First one works alone through the mind, then before the public through experience.

It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life.

In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.

I write to make sense of my life." -John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey