Chance favors the well prepared. The more stuff you throw in, the more chances you have of looking like, 'I did that. '
I like strongvulnerable interesting women, and then sometimes I like painting beautiful men, like Kurt Cobain, or Mr Darcy.
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.
You can break a thing, but you cannot always guide it afterward into the shape you want.
To be bothered wherever you go - it's not a rational thing to want at all.
I would never want to reach out someday with a soft, uncallused hand-a hand never dirtied by serving-and shake the nail-pierced hand of Jesus.
The twisted circumstances under which we live is grist for the writing mill, the loving, hating and discovering, finding new handles for old pitchers. . .