If I had a normal life Id quite cheerfully go mad and fall over right now

I had a Masters of Fine Arts, but so did thousands of other graduates every year, and we were all competing for the same jobs. I realistically didn't expect to become a teacher, and after two or three years, I accepted defeat.

I've tried over the years all kinds of ways of going about writing and even just thinking about the idea of writing. There was a time when I decided to try to write a song each day. Whether it was good or bad wasn't important.

I'm interested in that way we perceive things, and that was part of what I was getting into in painting - the idea of perception and how information goes through our heads and it comes out another way.

With abstract work, I never was quite sure what it was that felt right about the painting, but I did know that I responded to it and I liked whatever it was offering me.

When you're born with a tail, you learn to go through doors fast.

That's something that seems to happen when I'm writing, where maybe things that don't necessarily make a lot of logical sense are put together, and yet we struggle to make sense of these things somehow. I'm not quite sure why that is; it's something about human nature, I guess.