Violence can be very grotesque and also intensely attractive. What interests me is how the two - beauty and violence - live side by side, and how moments can be created and erased almost simultaneously. Destruction is painful, but at times it can be very cathartic.

I look at life as a one-time opportunity, and you have to take pleasure in each moment, even if it is very problematic.

Consider the bloody history of Europe: there was a great aspiration for high culture, yet this very same culture was shaped by brutality and barbarism.

I had a dream of music and art and the big city in which I would get lost, where no one would know me and I wouldn't know anyone, where I would work at some ordinary job, and if one day I got up in the morning and decided I wasn't going to go to work anymore, no one would ask questions.

I have lived all my life as part of an ethnic conflict.

For a short time I was an assistant to a professional photographer, and I felt that my soul was not there. That is the stage when I decided to stay in London and do a graduate degree.