Seeing a play, listening to music - you'll always contextualize it in your own way. Whoever you are, wherever you are; I think that's really important.

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.

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.

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

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.

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.