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

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.

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.

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.

With hope, we can endure any hardship.

Train your mind to see the opportunity in every adversity.

Paris is a place in which we can forget ourselves, reinvent, expunge the dead weight of our past.

I can do more good outside of prison... This country is worth dying for.

Almost nothing that makes any real difference can be proved.

When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing a space where new stories can root, in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.

Fortunately there is more wealth in the world than there was at the time of the global economic crisis of 1929 - Chinese, Indian, Arab and Russian.

Every child deserves a chance at a life filled with love, laughter, friends and family.

I and you and everyone else has to be a political activist.

Mother is the best and the first teacher to the child .