Cornelia Parker Quotes

The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.

I didn't know what to expect, having not been an artist before. From the outside, you only see romantic snapshots of what seems like a great lifestyle, and it is, but it's also grueling.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

I think people don't realize how little of being an artist is making art.

There are constant challenges in the drawing process, especially in a period piece, and therein lay the fun.

Painting to me is addictive. These are moments when it is inspiring, but they are few and far between. I keep my tools sharpened for the moment when things do start clicking, but that doesn't happen a lot. I really have to push myself sometimes. Painting is a profession in which it is very easy to be lazy, particularly if you have any degree of success.

If you're an artist, the problem is to make a picture work whether you are happy or not.

So many people seem to imagine that because the actual tools of writing are easily accessible, it is less difficult than the other arts. This is entirely an illusion.

I have always been haunted by the feeling that the painter has much to gain from making use of the forces that tend to work against his action.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.

I think what we should concentrate on is what it feels like to be a working artist in the day to day. One doesn't imagine what comes down the line.

It's not easy putting creative projects together. In my case, it might take a long time and you try to do the best.

In a way I do hate the process of writing. It's like learning a role where you never think you're going to be able to conquer it when you start and it just takes enough focus and narrowing and getting enthusiastic and not losing it and so on. It's never good enough, but you aim for something and you hope it comes somewhat close. But it is a pleasure once you have written it.

People ask me when I decided to become a playwright, and I tell them I decide to do it every day. Most days it's very hard because I'm frightened - not frightened of writing a bad play, although that happens often with me. I'm frightened of encountering the wilderness of my own spirit, which is always , no matter how many plays I write, a new and uncharted place. Every day when I sit down to write, I can't remember how it's done.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

I believe I have had the most trouble with a portrait which I painted in installments - the head on one canvas and the bust on another.

Even when it comes to writing fiction, how do you encompass all this stuff that's right on the tip of your tongue? You have to fold that into what you're working on.

Working with the artist elite can be like banging your head against the wall.

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.

It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then the painter realises that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope the picture might spring to life.

One of the factors that still keeps me in the studio is that every so often I have to more or less start all over.

Out-of-doors there is a greater variety of light than in the studio, where the light is always the same. But that is just the trouble; one is carried away by the light, and besides, one can't see what one is doing.

I think that gulf is what makes the work interesting, but as a creator it's endlessly frustrating because I'm starting out with this goal, this thing I'm trying to create, and then the thing I actually do create is very, very different. It's always painful, in some ways, especially when it's just finished.