If the work jells a little bit in terms of being placed in the oeuvre, I don't care - as long as it works.

I'm never really that worried about doing something a little different, 'cause it always just seems to fit into what I want to do.

I like comedy but I guess I don't think [my art] is that funny, either. It's too dark and a bit weird in places to be genuinely, uniformly hilarious and function as comedy.

I'm not pretending to be somebody who's got really limited craft skills. I just am a person who's got really limited craft skills.

I'm definitely not an outsider artist. I'm very much an insider artist. I get written about in art magazines, and I'm not, like, in a mental institution. I'm a regular guy who went to art school.

I never sat down and decided to make work about life and death. It just all comes out of my head like water pouring out of a jug.

I don't like theorizing about my work myself, but that's not to say I have no interest in theory. Other people are free to say what they want about my work.

I don't think I've ever made any conscious decision to be a comic artist, but to me there's something quite anarchic about comedy.

I think my books are better than my exhibitions. If people don't like my books then I don't mind. I guess you like them enough to write an essay about them so that makes me pretty happy.

The camera is an eye that sees and records the lives of filthy people. Its pictures are hung in museums and published in thick books that future generations can see how horrible life was.

The work, I suppose, is made in the editing, whereby I make literally hundreds of drawings, and then a much smaller percentage of those become the finished work.

A liberal knows that the only certainty in this life is change but believes that the change can be directed toward a constructive end.

Let's play Russian roulette. If you win, I give you a Colombian necktie.

Never reject an idea because it will create conflict!

Possessiveness isn’t love. I’m not even sure it qualifies as an emotion.

Without justice there can be no love.

Light be the earth upon you, lightly rest.

The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon . . . Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.

I know more now than I did in the past about the process of democratization. I know more about the pitfalls.

When people leave my show, I want them to say, 'I've never seen anything like that in my life ... It's amazing. He's the greatest entertainer in the world.'

My wife and I don't have kids and people are down on us about it. But we're just not wired that way, so don't tell me I have to.