“I like to think I have the guts to stand up anonymously in a western democracy and call for things no-one else believes in – like peace and justice and freedom.”

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

I know street art can feel increasingly like the marketing wing of an art career, so I wanted to make some art without the price tag attached. There’s no gallery show or book or film. It’s pointless. Which hopefully means something.

Some people represent authority without ever possessing any of their own.

People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine.

I used to encourage everyone I knew to make art; I don’t do that so much anymore.

If you have a statue in the city centre you could go past it every day on your way to school and never even notice it, right. But as soon as someone puts a traffic cone on its head, you’ve made your own sculpture.

Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.

It’s impossible to predict which paintings will last and which won’t. In New Orleans I painted on a dilapidated shop in a street littered with abandoned cars and rotting mattresses, then two hours later the piece was gone. It turned out I’d picked the side of a crack house and the proprietor didn’t like the attention.

I’d been painting rats for three years before someone said ‘that’s clever it’s an anagram of art’ and I had to pretend I’d known that all along.

If you feel dirty, insignificant or unloved, then rats are a good role model. They exist without permission, they have no respect for the hierarchy of society, and they have sex 50 times a day.

If you don’t own a train company then you go and paint on one instead… it all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something… that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it.

I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I’m not sure I like it enough.

The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It’s people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.

Become good at cheating and you never need to become good at anything else.

I love the way capitalism finds a place – even for its enemies.

The grumpier you are, the more assholes you meet.