At times, I've been incapacitated by anxiety and unhappiness. You really know what joy is if you have experienced the opposite.

You don't have to have angst to be an artist, but it's grist to the mill. If you want to explore the whole emotional spectrum in your work, it helps to have experienced intense emotions.

My father was a very controlling man, and it was a big relief to get away from that.

I don't want my work to be issue-based. I want people to be able to read it in lots of different ways.

Maybe it's my Catholic upbringing - I grew up thinking that Armageddon was just around the corner - now I know it is, with global warming and all. I can keep it at bay by doing the work. It's a sort of reverse sympathetic magic. I'm always doing it so it doesn't happen to me.

I started doing sculpture rather than painting. I was halfway through my degree, and I hadn't really done any introduction courses in sculpture... I'd missed all the technical stuff. I didn't really know how to weld or forge or carve or model. I'd sort of evaded all those technique classes, so I had no technique.

I'd love to do something like put a piece of moon rock on Mars and a piece of Mars on the moon, a sort of reverse archaeology.

I don't read the art mags. I read the newspapers.

I think my work is like a spiral: you keep coming back on yourself, but you're at a different place. It's like reading 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' every five years. You realise that some things have caught up.

I feel our relationship to life, to the rest of the world, is very tenuous. It feels fleeting.

I always feel my work is a chemical reaction between me and the world, wherever I happen to be.

I want to make work that reflects different times and processes.

The idea of going off to an office every day and 'putting on my art hat' doesn't appeal.

Some people separate their work and home lives, but I love the idea of having my studio and house in the same space.

I do think there is a link between the accidental art the sciences produce and the deliberate art the artist creates, but I can't help feeling that the innocence of the accidental art of science has a power and curious beauty that artists are hard-pressed to match.

Paul Auster is my favourite writer, and I'm sure he'd be a very interesting person to share a journey with.

I was involved in a serious accident driving in torrential rain at midnight in Cardiff. I was only doing five miles an hour, but because I couldn't see very well, I crossed a junction and collided with another car that was driving very fast. I ended up in hospital for six weeks with a shattered pelvis.

I don't drive for pleasure. It's purely to get from A to B.

I am not a propagandist; my work has often had a political dimension but, hopefully, one that is not didactic and is open to interpretation.

What was the most important thing I learned from Chomsky? That capitalism compels us to work ourselves to death in order to stuff our houses with things we don't need. Perhaps this is one thing art can do: create a new aesthetic, one of austerity.

I can consciously say I like squashing things because I saw 'Tom and Jerry' films or Charlie Chaplin in 'Modern Times.' That's true.

I think your subconscious knows far more than your conscious, so I trust it.

A lot of my work has been about stuff I've been frightened of: cliffs, explosions, meteorites, that kind of stuff. I would have been this trembling blob of fear if I hadn't got into making art, which is a good way of deferring it.

My father wanted a boy badly and didn't get one, so I was happy to be the surrogate boy. I was very strong, always doing manual labour.