If you are someone like Jeff Koons, and you have to work out how to make a big chrome heart or something, then there are lots of people and a big production involved. The money is more natural somehow. For me, I am just on my own in the studio, trying to make things work. One thing is sure: it doesn't make painting any easier.

There could be a hundred paintings in every one painting, depending on when you stop.

It's not about perfection. What's a perfect painting? What's interesting about a perfect painting?

I'm not one of those artists having people there lying around on their paintings, you know, like Hockney or whoever.

You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

It's still an escape for me, painting, so it also takes me elsewhere. I don't think I would do it otherwise.