All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It's true. You get the thing done, but you don't actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.