If you are lucky enough to be a success, by all means enjoy the applause and the adulation of the public. But never, never believe it.

Berlin seems like a place of healing to me though: you have both the Holocaust Memorial and Hiroshima Strasse side-by-side there. You have the whole last century libraried and you can see exactly what we did. Now there's lots of artists and musicians moving there because they can't afford the rent in London and New York, and they're having children and making it a gentle place. It seems to be a place of hope now.

A thunder-storm!—the eloquence of heaven, When every cloud is from its slumber riven, Who hath not paused beneath its hollow groan, And felt Omnipotence around him thrown? With what a gloom the ush’ring scene appears! The leaves all shiv’ring with instinctive fears, The waters curling with a fellow dread, A veiling fervour round creation spread, And, last, the heavy rain’s reluctant shower, With big drops patt’ring on the tree and bower, While wizard shapes the bowing sky deform,— All mark the coming of the thunder-storm!

Obviously my own work comes from a conceptual art tradition, but I love the graffiti artists, and I feel spiritually closer to them than to most contemporary art; they make the city a free space of diverse voices and we shouldn't get all cynical about them just because Banksy made some money. I collaborate sometimes with Krae, who is an old school east London graffiti writer.

...but when The Spirit speaks,—or beauty from the sky Descends into my being,—when I hear The storm-hymns of the mighty ocean roll, Or thunder sound,—the champion of the storm!— Then I feel envy for immortal words, The rush of living thought; oh! then I long To dash my feelings into deathless verse, That may administer to unborn time, And tell some lofty soul how I have lived A worshipper of Nature and of Thee!

Beneath our feet a fairy pathway flows, The grass still glitters in the summer breeze, The dusky wood, and distant copse appear, And that lone stream, upon whose chequer’d face We mused, when noon-rays made the pebbles gleam, Is mirror’d to the mind: though all around Be rattling hoofs and roaring wheels, the eye Is wand’ring where the heart delights to dwell.

And Thou, vast Ocean! on whose awful face Time’s iron feet can print no ruin-trace, By breezes lull’d, or by the storm-blasts driv’n, Thy majesty uplifts the mind to heaven.