Cornelia Parker

“I went to a quite macho art school in the 1970s, and while everyone was making hulking big sculptures, I was making things out of bits of paper.”

“I never got to play as a child. All my spare time was spent working on my family's smallholding.”

“Beauty is too easy. Often in my work, I take beautiful objects and do extreme things to them so that they are overlaid with something a bit more sinister and violent.”

“After leaving college, I was in a show called Sculpture by Women where I was asked to talk about my history of victimisation in art, and I genuinely didn't think I had been victimised. Although I obviously believe in a lot of the feminist aspirations, I was wary about being dragged down by the politics of it.”

“You only get one life, so it seems to me you might as well do the things you want to do.”

“I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art.”

“I think I'm a feminist, hopefully by example. I just feel it's important to do as much as I can as a woman, to the best of my ability.”

“I was involved in a serious accident driving in torrential rain at midnight in Cardiff. I was only doing five miles an hour, but because I couldn't see very well, I crossed a junction and collided with another car that was driving very fast. I ended up in hospital for six weeks with a shattered pelvis.”

“Maybe it's my Catholic upbringing - I grew up thinking that Armageddon was just around the corner - now I know it is, with global warming and all. I can keep it at bay by doing the work. It's a sort of reverse sympathetic magic. I'm always doing it so it doesn't happen to me.”

“I don't skip meals, because I get blood sugary.”

“I think your subconscious knows far more than your conscious, so I trust it.”

“If I'm not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill.”

“If people say, 'You can't do that,' you can be sure I will do my utmost to do it.”

“Dust, in the end, settles on everything.”

“When I was a kid, my mother used to say, 'You always want to be different.' I couldn't work out what she meant. I was just trying to be myself.”

“My work has threads of ideas from all over the place. I try to crystallise them in something simple and direct that the viewer can then take where they want.”

“If it is good enough for Prince William and Kate, why is studying art history not good enough for the masses?”

“Who thought it would be a good idea to undermine art in the school curriculum? Who thought studying the history of our visual culture was a waste of time? Who thought that only private schools should have that privilege? Was it someone who said we don't need experts?”

“I'm from a working-class background - I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school.”

“Jeremy Corbyn makes me angry. He seems vain.”