Christian Marclay Quotes

I was always tearing stuff apart to see how it worked.

There's a lot you can learn about something by taking it apart.

Appreciating complexity while searching through its thickets to find essential factors leads to understanding.

You explain how it went, and as far as you can figure out how it got that way.

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

You can think deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into a subject, depending on what you are writing about.

I've never been much into picking things apart.

It's always interesting exploring something that has dimensions and layers to it.

The best way to figure out how something works is to try to build it from scratch.

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size.

The difference between a tool and a machine is not capable of very precise distinction; nor is it necessary, in a popular explanation of those terms, to limit very strictly their acceptation.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

I tell you, it is easier to build a grand opera or a city center than to build a personal house.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted... but to weigh and consider.

I was one of those kids who took apart their toys to see how they work, just to see what they were made up of.

While you are experimenting, do not remain content with the surface of things.

I just wondered how things were put together.

The purpose creates the machine.

I like deconstructing things. I like cutting the legs out from under something that feels secret.

Engineering or Technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed.

You sit there, and you argue and you argue, and you sort of bully the hell out of the text until you're quite sure what it's revealing, and then you perform it.

There's a lot of new subject matter to learn. You start slowly peeling the onion and start figuring out how the policy and the politics intersect.

I'm just super nosy, I love trying to understand what's going on.

It strikes me that the only reason to take apart a pocket watch, or a car engine, aside from the simple delight of disassembly, is to find out how it works. To understand it, so you can put it back together again better than before, or build a new one that goes beyond what the old one could do. We've been taking apart the superhero for ten years or more; it's time to put it back together and wind it up, time to take it out on the road and floor it, see what it'll do.