It's a huge thing when people realize across the culture that paper money is paper. And that there's no fixed value - it's all political. That all value is set by a political authority, basically.

Culture is for old people. When you're young you have your body, and that's all you need.

I think what I do is find a cliché and try to believe in it, try to get to where I don't laugh at it.

I wonder whether there is such a thing as critical art. I suppose there are portraits of people who could destroy you.

Painting is like being a lawyer and attacking a corporation.

There is a fascination with violence and power in all modernism, and I sort of saw classic modernism as being more similar to Wyndham Lewis than to the Renaissance. It's not about flow and the presence of humanism and all those things.

A lot of the acting students would do modeling in the arts school, so there were some gorgeous girls, but the cliché in our school was to get either the really emaciated person or the really obese person - which is stupid.