Did I want to spend all my time working on a painting? No, I wanted to have fun, travel, meet women and live life.

I lived on a houseboat in Amsterdam for a year. It was intense, and it's possible that I even had a few blackouts.

You can't paint pictures of love. You can only imagine them. So I suppose I don't need a painting by another artist. I have enough of my own.

I think that the most important requirement is to capture the essence of a piece of art. You look at it, essentially absorb it, and you have to be able to understand it visually without having to think about how it was done. I was already able to do that as a child.

I only painted when I felt like it and needed money. But it never really became a professional thing, even though the dealers would have liked that.

I never decided to become an art forger. I was aware of my talent at an early age, and I used it foolishly. This developed over the years. In my heart, I don't see myself as a criminal.

Sometimes I smoked opium. And I also took LSD - for a while, quite a lot of LSD, in fact. But I never had any bad experiences. I stopped in 1985. I'd had enough, and I don't miss it, either.