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.

My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them.

In Paris now, when I walk into stores and the shopgirls literally say to me every time, "We don't have anything in your size".

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 just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.

There are days when everyone in the world looks like a Diane Arbus to me. She's a genius but her work is completely different to mine. But on those days I don't use my camera.

Some people have become [in U.S] a lot more conservative but I can't really speak about that because I wasn't there. I feel compassion for their pain but it distresses me to see them all become more patriotic.