I struggle against photography. I struggle against the fact that it is silent, that it is just a piece of paper on the wall, often presented in a tedious white matt frame.

I realized that if I wanted to truly talk about vastness and the sublime and scale and the West - recurrent themes in my overall work - I needed to engage with the vast ocean that is Los Angeles.

Los Angeles functions for me as a kind of holy template. It is postwar America.

... anybody who has spent time with cameras and photographs knows that images, like gravestone rubbings, are no more than impressions of the truth.

I come at a subject from a profoundly photographic level. I am not interested in pictures that ultimately don't work as pictures.

What better way to actually deal with L.A. than to get above it and engage with the horizontality and scale of the basin itself?

I have a profound passion for the act of flying. It's very freeing, with an intense physicality, but it also gives an Olympian, god's-eye view, which fuels a larger cerebral and structural analysis.

Flying was certainly formative for me; I have a deep and lasting ease with it as a result.

He leaned towards me, and I did what any reasonable person would do when facing imminent death by being eaten alive. I screamed.

Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected.

Gilbert White discovered the formula for complete happiness, but he died before making the announcement, leaving it for me to do so. It is to be very busy with the unimportant.

In short, not only are things not what they seem, they are not even what they are called!

Stories told around the water-cooler as well as statistics confirm that a man's competence is more likely to be presupposed, a woman's questioned.

Legends were not only for the desperate. Legends were for the brave. (Soren)

I slept in the bedroom used by Sabine Baring-Goulds wife when I was researching The Moor, and later the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor.

You don't organize metaphors . . . you explode them.

The most heartbreakingly poignant modern love story ever written.