I don't think writers should have writer's block. I think they should write. Imagine you were a bus driver and you said, 'I've got bus driver's block.' Get over it.
I think that I make chords when I paint, so I think you would be listening to the cello. It's deep, and it's resonant. A lot of people have compared me to Brahms - that slightly melancholic sensuality that's highly structured. Well, that describes my work right there.
I'm quite a social person, quite a communicator, and I like to have the work of other people around.
I was doing an interview with a curator, and he asked me to sum up art in one word. Before he even finished asking the question, I said, 'Impurity.' Because that's it.
After my son died, I went to a psychiatrist. He proved - or I proved - that Sigmund Freud was correct when he said that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis.
My father was a genius footballer, a natural, two-footed centre-forward who had played for Arsenal juniors, but he was sent out to work aged 14 and so lived out his life in a frustrated, rageful way.
I'm Irish in the mythic, romantic sense, but in the living sense, I'm a Londoner.
Imagine a world without art: it's George Orwell's nightmare!
I work on stretched linen canvas, sized so that the surface already has a sense of tension when I begin. It is a very rich and reactive surface. I begin by drawing on the canvas with a kind of loose line, very simply and freely. I paint very thinly, which allows me to change the drawing if I want to.
My childhood was extremely unhappy. That's not to say that my parents didn't love me. But it was traumatic, and of course, art doesn't come out of rosy gardens. It comes out of damage.
I am a very spiritual person: I could say a Catholic with a strong underpinning of Zen.
That's the job of art: to undo the logic of the world.
I'm really in the business of unifying these two tendencies that have been at odds in our human history for a very long time: the logical and the romantic.
