“I think of myself as a kind of pulverising machine into which everything I look at and feel is fed.”

“If life excites you, its opposite, like a shadow, death, must excite you.”

“I remember looking at a dog-shit on the pavement and I suddenly realized, there it is–this is what life is like.”

“For me realism is an attempt to capture the appearance with the cluster of sensations that the appearance arouses in me.”

“I would like my pictures to look as if a human presence had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory traces of past events, as the snail leaves its slime.”

“Photography has covered so much: in a painting that’s even worth looking at the image must be twisted…”

“I know it’s quite a privilege that the greatest writer of our time has written texts about me.”

“At the Saatchi collection there is a very interesting installation by a young man called Damien Hirst called ‘A Thousand Years.’ It is of a cow’s head in one compartment and in the second part they breed the flies which swarm around the cow’s head it really works.”