I look at the character of the exhibition and I treat it as I would a painting or an installation. When I did the Summer Exhibition at Royal Academy, I did it exactly as I would when making a new work.

If you close the door to the things you feel comfortable with, you will never discover the truth about yourself.

You can see in my paintings, I've taken away the context, I've taken away the shadows, I've taken away expression, I've taken away the personal, and yet so much remains!

In the studio, it took me a long time to work out how to make paintings that had the intensity that I was able to create by painting whole rooms. There is a very limited number of colours but there are many variations. I decided to use the purest palette that I could.

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

I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division.

I thought the objects we value least because they were ubiquitous were actually the most extraordinary.