Christian Marclay Quotes

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

To create something new is both thrilling and excruciating at the same time. It's great to have all these choices in front of you, and to have the writers in the room so you know exactly what they meant. But the downside is you want so badly not to screw it up!

You can't buy something which does not exist. In a way, let's make things exist and then judge later. Don't cancel the process of creativity too early; let it flow.

I have four or five ideas that just keep floating around and I want to kind of just let one - like a beautiful butterfly, let it land somewhere.

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

I come in. I'm going to sketch, I'm going to drape, I don't know what I'm going to do.

In general, I don't know when inspiration will pop up.

We're developing things, but I don't know what we'll go with for the show, so I don't like to talk about it.

The writing process is the time where nothing's been set in stone. It's a blank slate, or a blank page.

Sometimes, you don't know where your inspiration's going to come from.

Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

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.

And no, we don't know where it will lead. We just know there's something much bigger than any of us here.

At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.

The possible is constantly being redefined, and I care deeply about helping humanity move forward.

But we should also not forget the difference between what first motivated me and the work that is the result.

Anyone who does anything creative is always gonna want to change.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.

It is hard to say what the future holds, but this is probable - it won't be just like the past.

Life is one big transition.

Once, the world was full of mysteries, some of them frightening, some of them wonderful, some of them merely fascinating. Now, it can be a banal and predictable place, the tracks of daily life so well-beaten and defined, our culture awash with the imbecile obvious, our existence suffocating in safety. But mysteries remain.

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

The hardest thing is the idea. Ideas come from somewhere but as far as we know they come from nowhere.

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.