I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.

The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

A lot of people... are afraid of pictures which have visible emotions in them. They feel calmer in front of pictures which are placid.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.

Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.

I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Any fighter didn't like Muhammad Ali should have his head examined.

The way I played the game, the way I live my life, is very emotional.

Much of the material presented in schools strikes students as alien, if not pointless.

The mind serves to know the truth that fuels the fires of the heart.

During my time as England captain I have always been both helpful and direct in my communications with the ECB.

I can't tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.

A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love

That old man dies prematurely whose memory records no benefits conferred. They only have lived long who have lived virtuously.

'Doctor Who' was my first telly job, and before that I did a lot of theatre in education, children's theatre.