But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you've taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn't.

I avoid the public because the English public is too aggressive these days for me.

I'm a bit claustrophobic, I don't like crowds, I live by the sea - that's what I see when I come out of my house in Bridlington.

You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.

Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?

Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill.

I'm not really looking for theater work. But if somebody approaches me with enthusiasm, I might respond.

Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out.

Television is becoming a collage - there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.

It's no good saying I wished I could go out more, because I can't. But I don't bother about it too much.

What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.

I mean if you draw you like drawing, it's er, an activity you do all the time actually.

I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.

I'm not antisocial. I like people.

Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, 'Things don't look like that!'

Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do.

The moment rules over everything.

I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It's a bit obsessive. That's why I can't do it all the time.

As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?

I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.

All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.

Well, in Bradford I could say I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood.