What happens with experiences that really move us deeply, that really effect us? They make the world new again. What it does is it heightens our sense of mortality.

You spend your whole life trapped inside your body. Everything you know about the world comes to you through your body.

As a boy I was obsessed with Egypt and Egyptology. I'm convinced it's not that uncommon. A lot of 10 or 12 year old boys become obsessed with Egypt. It's a bit like young girls and horses.

The world is a colony of the US. The twentieth century was the US's century.

Most of life is grey, with a little tiny bit of black and white. We're always subject to what I call the compression industry, which is an attempt to compress a million shades of grey with a little bit of black and white to just a hundred, or to ten, or to one!

I have always found the suburbs very beautiful – the light, the change of seasons and so on. I am not so interested in the political dimensions of these things. I didn’t have any witticisms to land on suburbia. I was really just interested in how beautiful it was. I felt it was like a dreamscape and once I understood that was how I needed to approach it the dream started to expand in unusual ways.

No medium is more limited than any other. It's what a person does with it. We could talk about the differences between music and literature and photography, sure, but it really comes down to what a person does.