I think from an artist's point of view, everything in art, in fact everything in the world is available as material.

Sometimes we look at a work of art and we immediately think that it is German art, but with some we don't, it's not so obvious.

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.

In a sense [Joseph] Albers was an authoritarian teacher. He had rules about most things and very definite ideas.

I greatly admired him as a teacher I didn't teach the same way as Josef Albers at all.

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.

When I was in Wuhan, I went to the art school, which was one of the most important art schools in China, an enormous art school. One of the things that I saw is that the schools are very big and there are so many students. It is very difficult to me to teach creative activity to great numbers of people, because I think you need personal contact with students, you need to speak individually, you need individual contact between teachers and students, you need continuity. To me this is a problem in mass education in every society now.