The space between things is important to me. The projections, that darkness between the words or the images is very important.

ne thing you have to develop as an artist is a confidence in what you're doing and that you're right about it.

Whatever came out came out. That was it. That's what you live with. If you don't like it, that's your problem.

I always had a fairly decent income, coming in just from the art.

But if I did read, say, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, for instance, it always seemed to me that the parts that I understood in what he was talking about - and I read him because - well, he wrote a book, well, the Phenomenology of Perception [New York: Humanities Press, 1962]. And it seemed to me that perception had a lot do with how we take in art.

I'm getting more and more into Chinese art and Japanese, some of those scroll paintings are amazing. You follow the change of the seasons. It's really something. These guys were great masters and of course the use of space.

And style, by the way, is a very important thing. It is like your signature, your handwriting or it is something that you develop that is your way of presenting yourself and also your way of looking at what art - of how to make art.