I think my work is like a spiral: you keep coming back on yourself, but you're at a different place. It's like reading 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' every five years. You realise that some things have caught up.

I don't read the art mags. I read the newspapers.

I'd love to do something like put a piece of moon rock on Mars and a piece of Mars on the moon, a sort of reverse archaeology.

I started doing sculpture rather than painting. I was halfway through my degree, and I hadn't really done any introduction courses in sculpture... I'd missed all the technical stuff. I didn't really know how to weld or forge or carve or model. I'd sort of evaded all those technique classes, so I had no technique.

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 want my work to be issue-based. I want people to be able to read it in lots of different ways.

My father was a very controlling man, and it was a big relief to get away from that.

You don't have to have angst to be an artist, but it's grist to the mill. If you want to explore the whole emotional spectrum in your work, it helps to have experienced intense emotions.

At times, I've been incapacitated by anxiety and unhappiness. You really know what joy is if you have experienced the opposite.

Jeremy Corbyn makes me angry. He seems vain.

I do 10 minutes of Pilates every morning if I'm in the mood.

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

My parents were always doubtful about my making a living as an artist. Even when I was up for the Turner Prize, my mum suggested I apply for a curator's job.

People often want the big dramatic works, not the smaller quieter ones, but I don't worry about how it fits together anymore; I just have to do it. I feel compelled to make a work: it's like an itch I have to scratch, and once it's been scratched, it goes away.

I try to avoid the 'art world' as much as possible. It's too much about fads and fashions - who's getting the best prices at auction and things like that.

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 definitely didn't want children, because my childhood was not a very happy time.

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.

I don't particularly look at other artists when I'm working. But references do come into my work intuitively.

Art historical reference is like learning to drive a car - you always know how to drive even though you're not analysing how.

That's the problem with working and living in the same space - my studio is downstairs, so I often get distracted by domestic things.

If I was prime minister, I would declare a state of emergency on climate change.

The best ideas come out of getting lost.

When people listen to music, they don't worry about what it means like they do about art. Everyone's an expert on music, but with art, I always find I have to defend its existence.

I'm not very party-political, really; I am more strategic than that.

I am interested in the press and what they do.

Traditional conceptual art is very dry.

I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art.

Even though people think I am more of a conceptual artist, I am actually very intuitive. For me, it is still a matter of allowing things to naturally rise to the top of my mental pile, and then I make them.

My mother was German, and I was brought up with 'Struwwelpeter' stories, which are invested with all sorts of horrors waiting for you if you do the wrong thing.

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.

I think I was a late developer because I'd been stuck in the country and was a little bit shy and withdrawn.

I have never fitted neatly into the arts section, I don't think.

I was my father's sidekick, in a way. He was a very dominant, forceful character.

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

If you conceal things, they become more charged.

A lot of my stuff just wasn't saleable. I still don't do private or corporate commissions. It becomes like interior design. I don't enjoy it. The process makes me feel physically sick.

Driving a steamroller over an old trumpet or a teaspoon is no more destructive than taking a chisel to a lump of marble already torn from the landscape. But people don't see it that way because marble is considered noble.

I gave birth aged 45, which was a bit of a shock.

To make large, site-specific work as an artist is usually quite tortuous; there are so many boxes you have to tick.

I had two great art teachers at school, but even they tried to tell me it was too hard a world. But that made being an artist even more attractive.

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

Artists and scientists are very close. They always have been, but I think we've just been divided out over the last few centuries into specialisms. Leonardo da Vinci was drawing helicopters and all kinds of things. We're artificially divided. I think we're closer than we think we are.

Artists and scientists both think outside the box. They've got to come with genius experiments or ideas to expose the most interesting phenomena.

If you cut art from school, you're going to have a lot more looted shops.

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

I always love the court fool in Shakespearean times, in Henry VIII's time. The fool can say all kinds of stuff that the other people can't say, so I'm hoping I might take that role.