I've had to do all kinds of jobs to pay the rent. I've even worked in a Cornish tin mine.

I had been living with dialysis for three years or so, and the new kidney felt like a reprieve, a new gift of life. I felt alive again and I guess that has had an effect on my use of colour.

Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own.

I tried to learn the violin for a while.

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

I have to experiment with methods and I'm trying to find an authentic way of making an equivalent of the living, breathing person within the limits of a single picture.

When I look at some of my old work, the pieces I find most interesting are the ones with people in them.

You could always go on changing things but there comes a time when you have to decide to stop.

I think most people see drawing as subservient to the subject, a sort of meditation, a studying, a searching observation, in my case, for its own sake.

Love...who needed love? As long as she had her books and her friends and an occasional hookup, she was perfectly content.

Demons are like obedient dogs

It is possible to feel angered by the compromises all around us, while remaining apathetic to the compromises inside us.

There's nothing so improves the mood of the Party as the imminent execution of a senior colleague.

Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvelously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne.

And everything that comes out of my mouth is gonna be repeated in two-sentence-long bites for the next years of my life. Certain words travel far and wide.

What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate - and immediately forget we have done so.

Pigs are very intelligent. They're very misunderstood. Yet they're sort of man's unofficial best friend.

Just jump in with both feet and live your life, no matter what.

Life is too short to blame other people.