A Quote by Cornelia Parker

Once I started reinventing for myself what being an artist was - not going into a studio, but making things on my own terms in response to being out in the world - I started to really enjoy it... I realized that everything else for me was hell.
I started writing when I was around 6. I say 'writing,' but it was really just making up stuff! I started writing and doing my own thing. I didn't really know what a demo was or anything like that, so I started getting interested in studio gear and started learning about one instrument at a time. My first instrument was an accordion.
I really like my life right now. I have friends around me all the time. I’ve started painting more. I’ve been working out a lot. I’ve started to really take pride in being strong. I love the album I made. I love that I moved to New York. So in terms of being happy, I’ve never been closer to that.
I started writing my own things when I was about 8. I used to try to bully my friends into imitating the Spice Girls on the playground. Then I realized, Oh god, my career's going nowhere, so I looked in the Yellow Pages and phoned up the first cheap studio that I found and started recording.
When I look back, it saddens me to think that I was so hard on myself - when I was younger, I thought I had to look like everyone else, but I learned that beauty comes from how you feel about yourself. Once I started taking care of my mind, body, and soul, I realized that I didn't need to conform to what's "normal" and started to love myself.
I've never had a time where I didn't want to do my jewelry anymore. Once I started it, and once I realized I was really doing something I loved, I gave it my heart. When we first started the company, I did it all myself in our living room.
So I realized when I was successful in a piece, it was because I didn't abandon a notion early on what it ought to be, and I let it take me along. So I've had songs that started out as being about the environment and ended up being love songs and love songs that ended up being about the environment. I've had things that I thought would be a poem and realized that it was just too big for that. I've got to do something larger and it became a play. I wrote one poem that started a whole play.
Being on my own in a studio is really, really different than making music with the band. I can't say I necessarily enjoy it more, but it was just a new experience for me.
I went to college to find myself. That's where I really realized I wanted to be a recording artist and started on the process of figuring out how to do that.
My vision of being a professional, as opposed to being a football player before, has completely changed. Being a pro is doing everything right all the time. It sounds cliche, but if you apply that to strength training, if you apply that to a lot of body work, if you apply that to making good decisions, all the work I did on myself and all the time I spent with therapists and doctors and family, that was my mantra: "Do it right all the time." It started to build momentum, and it started to build up steam. Once I got the opportunity to come back and play, I just kept using that and it helped.
When I first got into the studio once again, and I started hearing the beats, the anger and bitterness was coming out of me. I guess somewhat I was also being brainwashed by what was going on today. I thought that to fit in, I had to do what was hot right now, which is not the case.
Around 2001, I went to rehab in Arizona, and I started to see what was going on and how the past affected me. I started to get a grip on it. But over the next decade, I reverted to the behaviour I used to protect myself when I was young - being mindless, being defeatist and full of bravado.
If I'd waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started "being creative," well, I'd still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it's in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.
It took me a while to really believe in myself or feel determined about it, but then once I realized that it's possible for anyone, and these people who are singers started off very normal... I realized that it was not that hard to do.
My stance has always been that my issue compared to everything else going on in the world is really, really small. Once you realize that, you can get a lot more out of being a part of the solution.
The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . . Getting started, keeping going, getting started again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm.
'Game of Thrones' was the first fantasy thing I've done, and like a lot of people who enjoy the show watching it, I didn't expect to respond to that world, but when I started doing it, I really started to love it, started to realize that some of the things I'm naturally drawn to.
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