I believe in Scotland's place within the United Kingdom today as much as ever.
I do have a very, very big problem with someone who saw me coming and exploited me as a mascot.
I had been painting Kate Moss for a long time, both before the time of her crisis and during it. I felt very strongly for her - she's a hard-working mum and it seemed as if suddenly the world turned against her. Holy water cannot help you now is painted in very warm pretty colours.
Even in the most horrendous situations there is always something to smile about.
My working hours are not that conventional. I often get up about two in the morning and do a painting, and then I'll have a bath, and then I often feel very hungry around 4am, so I'll go into Soho and have a meal somewhere like Balans. That's what I love about living here - there's always life around me.
Perhaps the people I choose to paint are often objects of derision - celebrity is a bit of a put-down term, isn't it? But to me they are my world.
I will look through 200 photographs of Kate Moss and there will be just one that I connect with for some reason, maybe because of the composition or something in the eye. . . Something touches me and I know I have to paint it, in the way a child knows it wants something.
If people really want to go, and really try all their lives, I think they will get in; for I don't believe there are any locks on that door, or any guards at the gate. I always imagine it is as it is in the picture, where the shining ones stretch out their hands to welcome poor Christian as he comes up from the river.
"My #1 guiding principle for a successful life (learned from J Brad Britton): "Do the right thing; not the easy thing. " Everyday, you are constantly faced with choices to do either the right thing (any activity that moves you closer to where and who you want to be) or the easy thing (anything else). In every moment of choice, choose to do the right thing over the easy thing, and your becoming successful is inevitable.
We are waiting not for a Godot but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.
They don't understand the multi-life sequences. Anything they can't see in a laboratory, they think is nonsense.