I worked in the NHS as a hospital orderly during my national service, and people thought it was a noble service. But over the years it's lost its humanity.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.

Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it.

To me, the world's rather beautiful if you look at it. Especially nature.

Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.

It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.

I haven't stopped painting or drawing - I've just added another medium.

What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.

I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning.

We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

I'm always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things.

I paint what I like, when I like and where I like.

When you stop doing something, it doesn't mean you are rejecting the previous work. That's the mistake; it's not rejecting it, it's saying, 'I have exploited it enough now and I wish to take a look at another corner.'

You must plan to be spontaneous.

It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.

And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh.

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

All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.

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

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

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

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

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.

The moment rules over everything.

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.

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!'

I'm not antisocial. I like people.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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 see the iPad as a wonderful new drawing medium, but I am at a loss as to how to make it pay.

People tell me they open my e-mails first, because they aren't demands and you don't need to reply. They're simply for pleasure.

West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things.

On the iPhone I tended to draw with my thumb. Whereas the moment I got to the iPad, I found myself using every finger.

I'm fed up with being bossed around.