Thus far, everything I've made has come out of my really feeling it, out of the fire of my life.

When I was very little, I probably wanted to be more normal. I probably wanted the Laura Ashley bedroom, and instead I got thrift-store everything.

Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful, except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be.

It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly.

I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well disguised, we pretended boredom and prayed for traffic.

The life you live in front of an audience is like an altered state - it's not totally real. I'm always, even in the course of one day, trying to find ways to balance both sides.

The thing I am most interested in is power relations - it is so easy in a relationship like that [of an artist and a gallery manager], to imagine that the other person is living a perfect life.