I keep the shutters closed because I like to work in a hermetic environment. I like mirrors. When you look out of the window, all you see is ugliness, but when you look in the mirror all you see is beauty.

You look in the mirror, but you don't see what you actually look like.

My grandfather was a practising Quaker. My father was a nihilist. But nihilism, if you like, is the beginning of faith anyway.

You mirror what the world mirrors to you.

You may look back on your life and accept it as good or evil. But it is far, far harder to admit that you have been completely unimportant; that in the great sum of things, all a man's endless grapplings are no more significant than the scuttlings of a cockroach.

You see, I don't draw from life at all, but I do look out of my window a lot.