Christian Marclay's Quotes

Art is all in the details.

As an artist, you're always somewhat obscure. We're not talking Hollywood.

Every person's remembering will be different. That engagement is important, I think.

I have never been much of a painter.

I've never been a big cinephile, which may be why I could treat 'The Clock' like a puzzle and force the pieces to fit together in odd ways.

If you make something good and interesting and not ridiculing someone or being offensive, the creators of the original material will like it.

It's good to get away from the editing suite. It's very unhealthy to be sitting in front of the screen for too long.

It's the way life is, I suppose. Whatever happens, you deal with it.

Since I was a child I have always been cutting things out and gluing them together rather than drawing them.

The process of editing is what I enjoy most - putting the pieces together and making sense out of them.

Unlike sitting at a computer screen, printing is very direct and hands-on.

When you take something apart, you get a great sense of what it took to originally put it together.

With improvisation, I just do it. It might be a total failure but then you just throw the dice again.

You can get so many sounds out of one record. Every record can be used in some way.

You start with an idea but then so many things can happen.

I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I'm referencing American '60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture.

If the music in a groove fits with what you're playing, then play it; if not, then you can play it backwards. If that doesn't work, you try it at a different speed. If it really doesn't work you just break it. The whole ritual to put a record on a turntable just to listen to it, I don't do that too often.

People who care about records are always giving me a hard time. I mean, I would destroy records in performances, and break them, and whatever I could do to them to create a sound that was something else than just the sound that was in the groove.

'Record Without A Cover' was about allowing the medium to come through, making a record that was not a document of a performance but a record that could change with time, and would be different from one copy to the next.

These things I sample, or clip, are things that we share - music, films, sounds. It triggers a layer of participation from the audience as they recognize the material and remember it.

We go to the movies to forget about time, to be in a dream state. And it's entertainment, distraction, from the fact that everything is kind of crumbling in front of our eyes.