I used to live with Teri Toye in the '80s - a really gorgeous transsexual. She won Girl of the Year in 1986 [I think] as a Chanel model and she introduced this whole way of slinky, slow-motion modeling. It was amazing that the girl of the year was actually born male.

When I put my big retrospective together in '96 [for the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York], I saw that there were all these pictures of people inside looking out. All these pictures of women in water and mirrors. I don't know what it means.

I wasn't there [in U.S] when the city was bombed but it seems to have changed my friends.

The things that I look at include Renaissance art. I'm obsessed with churches and paintings of saints.

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.

Yes, I need to be fed but the need to be loved by friends has been as important to me than any lover I've had all my life. This is part of the reasons that my lovers don't stay because they are jealous of how much I care about my friends.

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