“Something about glamour interested me. All my schoolbooks had drawings of women on terraces with a cocktail and a cigarette.”

Red is the ultimate cure for sadness.

Reading has given me more satisfaction than really anything else.

I have a firm belief in such things as, you know, the water, the Earth, the trees and sky. And I’m wondering, it is increasingly difficult to find those elements in nature, because it’s nature I believe in rather than some spiritual thing.

When in doubt, wear red.

Fashion can be bought by anybody; style takes discernment, it has to do with individuality.

There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].

I’m never drawing the object itself; I’m only drawing a depiction of the object – a kind of crystallized symbol of it.

But when I worked on a painting I would do it from a drawing but I would put certain things I was fairly sure I wanted in the painting, and then collage on the painting with printed dots or painted paper or something before I really committed it.

Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes.

I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.

I’d always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn’t.