Christian Marclay Quotes

All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.

There is no facet of my professional life that doesn't require or request improvisation.

An actor can never plan. You never know what can work in your favour or not and then maybe the whole dynamics can change.

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

The whole thing about doing TV is that you never know what's going to happen. You just have to go with it and go with the flow.

I always leave room for serendipity and chance.

My life is spontaneous and things just kind of happen.

We can't plan life. All we can do is be available for it.

The whole thing about the way I approach work is to be surprised by an opportunity when it comes up. So I have no idea what I will be doing next, and I kind of like that.

Every time I've made a plan in my Hollywood acting career, something else has happened, so I've gotten out of the habit of trying to predict the future.

You don't know what's gonna happen, so you can't really plan: you can only go with it.

I've never really had a plan. You never know what's going to happen.

I am always living in the now, so I like what fate brings to you. That's always fun for me. To have a process and someone be like, 'How about this?' And you just grab onto that and see where it takes you.

My life and career have been a big improvisation.

No, I never planned my life.

The nature of improvisation is you don't know what's going to happen.

Life is an art, not a science. You make it up as you go along.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

But chance runs like a river through all our lives, and being prepared for surprise is the best we can do.

If you don't have a plan, you can end up doing some interesting things.

I like things that don't look like you're in control. It's like life itself. You just learn how to benefit from accidents and chances that you take.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

Although idea and form are ultimately paramount in my work, so too are chance, accident, and rawness.