I'm very influenced by a lot of things, but my chief influence is my friends and what I see and what I feel and my own experiences and memory.

I've become really interested in the landscape but not as landscape but more as it relates to mood and how we live and how the outside impacts on the inside. I didn't really look at the outside world during the years I was photographing the Ballad as I was locked inside my house and I lived totally inside.

That's where I got the idea to paint the walls of the gallery with varied colours [at the Whitechapel show]. I tried to figure out how all these Renaissance paintings manage to work together.

I think it's obscene that many people are starving to death from anorexia. It's been said many times, it's trite. But when so much evil is going on against, for example the Afghani people, where women are being so oppressed that a woman's body is a battlefield.

No Jews have our own guilt, that's why we have psychiatrists - the Jewish version of a priest.

I also photographed Maggie Cheung - but these didn't develop into a friendship either.

It's a hideous feeling to go round shopping and even feel like you are a freak.