It's very easy to say, 'I could have done that,' after someone's done it. But I did it. You didn't. It didn't exist until I did it.

Artists are like everybody else.

But the answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live.

I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting. Like finding some imaginary computer painter, or a robot who paints.

When I used to do abstract paintings at school, like everyone else, the tutor said these would make great curtains. I would always neglect the formal stuff that was going on by using colour, because colour kind of came naturally to me.

You've got to be oblivious to other people, the push and pull of other people's opinions, the way other people measure success. It's then that you realize you are 100 percent who you are and you have to use that who-you-are 100 percent in order to create great things.

Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don't think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius.