“I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.”

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.

Yeah, you know, you like it to come on like gangbusters, but you get into passages that are very interesting and subtle, and sometimes your original intent changes quite a bit.

I don’t think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.

People mistake the character of line for the character of art. But it’s really the position of line that’s important, or the position of anything, any contrast, not the character of it.

I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward – neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

People think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn’t. It’s a convention.

Personally, I feel that in my own work I wanted to look programmed or impersonal but I don’t really believe I am being impersonal when I do it. And I don’t think you could do this.

Picasso’s always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

I don’t really know what to make of it. There’s something terribly brittle about it. I suppose I would still prefer to sit under a tree with a picnic basket rather than under a gas pump, but signs and comic strips are interesting as subject matter.

I think its the tension between what seems to be so rigid and cliched and the fact that art really cant be this way.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it’s very hard to guess at a size or a color and the colors around it and what it will really look like. It’s only a guess at the beginning, and then I try to refine it.

When I met Steve Kaufman, I thought he was Gene Simmons, but what an artist talent he is. He will be an art force in the art world to deal with.

All my art is in some way about other art, even if the other art is cartoons.

A number of artists have done things with Mickey Mouse – including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. He’s such an American symbol, and such an anti-art symbol.

I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?

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.

In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.

You don’t want to be doing it. But you have to. You have to keep moving forward.

There’s a lot to do when you’re a kid – spiders to catch, girls to poke in the eye – stuff to be getting on with.

What am I supposed to do if I go bald? Get a wig? Fat, goofy, gay, wig.

It’s what we do as a species. It’s what makes us human. We brew.

We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs and price stability.

I think what we’re really bad at doing is recognising that it is possible to have lost of different views within the church.

What then are doing if not creating a better place together? I think, for me the key has to be, what do I want to create? What is it I want to leave behind?