I would never put a sculpture in front of a painting, so that it is difficult to see the painting. I always place each thing so you can see it isolated. You can focus on every individual work.

In the late 70's I started to make drawings of the ordinary objects I had been using in my work. Initially I wanted them to be ready-made drawings of the kind of common objects I had always used in my work. I was surprised to discover I couldn't find the simple, neutral drawings I had assumed existed, so I started to make them myself.

You can take things from the past, from the culture, from the immediate past and things that have not yet entered the culture, so they have no history yet. You can create your own context.

I was poorer than anyone I'd ever met. But it was a great time to be a young artist - I remember it as a period of exceptional creative freedom and adventure, when one was regularly presented with works of art unlike anything one had ever seen before.

I came to painting through sculpture, to images through objects. I think that images sit in the middle, somewhere between objects and words.

When I started teaching in the late 60s, in a time of student revolutions and changes, they changed in question of society and authority.

Today, in British education, we don't have that kind of freedom. Now there are many regulations, many rules, and bureaucracies in the education system. So, it doesn't have the flexibility that it had in the '60s, '70s, '80s.