Painting can be like poetry but as somebody who creates both I feel the necessity for both so they cant be that similar. Sometimes I think it's as basic as not wanting to get dirty.

I sometimes use music as way of getting back to a certain time, dredging up stuff from the past and putting it down on canvas.

Some of my work is very instinctive, some of my favourite things I've ever done are just two minute sketches, nothing is better when you get it like that so quick, then other work takes months.

I don't really need to be inspired by literature though. At the end of the day it's colour and imagery moved around until it works.

Women really like the horses, more so than men.

Sometimes I just want to sit and write at a clean table and not get paint all over my hands.

The spirit of a painting is very hard to explain and articulate. I can't say it's not intentional because that is the mark I'm trying to hit, however I don't feel I have much control over it.

I used to use a lot of words in the paintings but stopped because it created a narrative - or an answer to a question.

If you can see a world within a portrait I would be happy with that. I don't want to tell the story with a painting, though. I'm trying to get away from the story- from the beginning and the ending.

I have no way of knowing what you are going to feel when you look at one of my paintings; I only know what I feel.

I like to listen to a lot of classical music when I'm painting, the most simplistic stuff I can find. I like simple piano.

Don't be an escort to people on their way to success, for it is equally as if you're a sign post, leading the way, and rusting at the end.

Computers make me totally blank out.

My mother was a feminist and a divorcee who worked. She was very smart.

As Trevor Noah recently quipped, the US appears ready to crown its first African dictator: Donald Trump.

My belief also is that Marilyn Monroe passed away long before she should have left us.

Wit is not levelled so much at the muscles as at the heart; and the latter will sometimes smile when there is not a single wrinkle on the cheek.

God walks with us. He scoops us up in His arms or simply sits with us in silent strength until we cannot avoid the awesome recognition that yes, even now, He is there.

Sometimes what I'm looking for is the thing that will help renew people's interest in a writer that they may have written off as not their kind of writer.

I'm on the advisory board of Alex's Lemonade Stand, which is a children's cancer charity. I'm so proud to be on that and help them.

What amazes me is when I see people in their twenties who have families or live a life that seems of a much older person. But that's such a demographic, a socio-economic, cultural, class thing.