Cornelia Parker Quotes

I've watched too many artists in my life forget how good the things they used to do were.

The '90s weren't my finest years artistically. I wrote some good songs in there, but in terms of my vision of getting the paint on the canvas, that was not my best time. I didn't like the fact that I had fallen into mediocrity.

You look at most artists, the arc of their career, there's a definite decline at the end. And that decline could set in at any time. In your 50s, or your 60s and 70s if you're lucky. Time goes by fast, and you've got to be busy all the time.

Whenever I finish a movie, I usually go through a period where I think I'll never have another idea. And then, somehow, you get another idea.

Actually, after 'All Love Lost' I was so drained creatively that I didn't have any clue where I wanted to go. So I just started from scratch.

I wouldn't have been in the mind-set to do another 'Fly.'

You can only be the great artist for so long - come out with effort after effort that garners all this praise.

'Writer's block' sounds so dramatic and worrisome, and I don't worry about it. I know deep down that I'm a writer, and it's just a matter of time until it comes back, and when it does, it'll be good like it's always been.

When I have a creative block, I take walks. I like to see what shapes stick out - so many legs rushing by at once, it can seem abstract. I don't need to see great art to get stirred up. Music does that for me more easily.

I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.

When inspiration does not come, I go for a walk, go to the movie, talk to a friend, let go... The muse is bound to return again, especially if I turn my back!

I'm not sure I know how to make music anymore. Maybe you're given a window into things for a time, and beyond that maybe it goes away. Why should you expect it to stay?

I say I have a midlife crisis every time I start and finish a record.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

Most designers work up to a peak. They do some great stuff, and then it's just junk.

In all fields of creativity you see the result of work that has become habit. Where the creative impulse has become flaccid or has died out altogether, and yet because it is our work and our life we continue to do it.

My theory about why Hemingway killed himself is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

Well, I just think through your career you go through different phases, and I just got sort of uninspired by the whole studio process of making and releasing films.

I'll know when the ideas aren't fresh anymore. And I'll know when writing doesn't give me a thrill anymore.

I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.

I believe an artist dies twice. The first time, it's just terrible - I've been there when the phone isn't ringing for years.

It was more that his career was going down again and he was tired of the songs. He was tired of the routine. And there was a point where he just kind of gave up. He couldn't face being 40. And he resorted to stimulants. There's a dark side there, a really dark side.

The day I run out of ideas is the day I stop making records.

Probably not much of a song left in me, you know, if any, because I've written so many, some 250 songs or 300 or whatever it is.

I did the rock 'n roll-pop cliche of getting burnt out. I'm not the first person that happened to, and I'm sure I won't be the last.