To be a flamboyant failure, that's better than being any kind of benign success

Our culture has become something that is completely and utterly in love with its parent. It's become a notion of boredom that is bought and sold, where nothing will happen except that people will become more and more terrified of tomorrow, because the new continues to look old, and the old will always look cute.

I left school at 16 and my mother got me a job as a trainee wine taster. But one day I followed some girls into St Martin's art school and saw a voluptuous woman sitting on a stool being sketched. I decided to get myself fired.

Through all aspects of society be it art, design, the financial markets, government, technology or communications we are witnessing unprecedented global transformation - the result of which is impossible to predict.

The thing about Paris, it's a great city for wandering around and buying shoes and nursing a cafe au lait for hours on end and pretending you're Baudelaire. But it's not a city where you can work.

Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed.

The Pistols were like my work of art. They were my canvas.