Sam Taylor-Wood's Quotes

I struggle if I have chaos around me, but at the same time, if I don't have it, I'm uncomfortable. It's a strange thing: If I don't have chaos, I create it.

I understand what it is to go through emotional trauma and retreat and go into the world of your imagination. I understand how art and music can be a place of safety in a world of reinvention.

I went to Goldsmith College of Art in London in the '80s and there I made sculptures, but the objects had nothing to do with how I was thinking. I was making beautifully sanded wooden boxes!

I'm interested in taking raw human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure. In order to achieve this, I try to break out of the narrative conventions that you'd see in a typical feature film.

I've been through plenty in my life where I've really had to focus on the day ahead... because, as I know, the future is, you know, whatever the future is... Once you've stared mortality that hard in the face, you really seize the day.

Money scares me, and it always has done. I've got a childish concept of money, and I like to keep it that way in the sense that I don't like to think about it.

My mum has lived in Australia for 22 years now, and we have a rocky relationship. But at the same time it's one I want to maintain. I need her to be my mum. The relationship took a lot of rebuilding.

My work is made on lines similar to those of a film production. A lot of my work is kind of bureaucratic, endlessly phoning up people, trying to find the cameraman and the lighting man, because I am a total technology-phobe, quite helpless with equipment.

When you're no longer ill, and everyone's gotten over the fact that you've had cancer, that core of steel doesn't go away, and then I had to find other channels for it.

Having children is exciting. Life puts the past into perspective.

I feel like I've lost 10 years of my life to cancer.

I felt giving birth was the most creative act of all my creative acts - literally creation!

I find that I put my body in my work when I am at a particularly difficult or joyous point because I want to feel that moment.

I love karaoke. I love maudlin country ballads. In another life, I'd be Loretta Lynn.

I never thought of having cancer as something that was unfair. I just braced myself and tried to get through it.

I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.

I remember as a kid not ever wanting to have friends around to my house because it was, for want of a better description, disheveled.

I seize all opportunities with two hands. Everything that's happened to me has taught me to live in the moment as much as possible.

I think people are frightened of women making big decisions.

I think you only see experiences as defining moments with distance.