I think everybody can be beautiful. Anybody can have beauty. It's about how you look at the world, in a way, and how you treat yourself.

Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman was one of those books I read in my mid-twenties that was life-changing. I think I had a very black-and-white view of Marie Antoinette before, but in reading that book, I developed a lot of empathy for her. She was just caught up in history. There was no place for a woman to do anything at that time anyway.

You really need faith in yourself to make art and to stand up for what you believe in.

I like the really human sides of people. To meet them and see that they’re complicated and weird or shy or any of those things sort of makes it even better—to know that they can rise above that and make something great.

To paint well, I need to be enraptured by my subjects.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

Romanticism is not just about being in a fixed state of endless beauty, because you can't live like that or live on that, that's what I've learnt.