The camera is as much a part of my everyday life as talking or eating or sex.

I always thought if I photographed anyone or anything enough, I would never lose the person, I would never lose the memory, I would never lose the place. But the pictures show me how much I've lost.

If I do continue to do fashion, I would want to radicalise it.

I was recently interviewed for radio in relation to the "Thanksgiving" show [2001] at the Saatchi gallery that I was part of. The interviewer said that people in London were very disturbed that I showed a picture of myself battered ("Nan One Month after Being Battered", 1984) and they thought that I set it up. I was accused of deliberately putting on a wig for that particular picture.

I did [heroin] maybe when I was 18 but I got over that pretty quickly.

My desire is to preserve the sense of people’s lives, to endow them with the strength and beauty I see in them. I want the people in my pictures to stare back.

I never read theory. I think that was to my benefit.