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In the Seventies, album artwork became really beautiful items. The whole process of doing an album sleeve, it became a very artistic thing.

One of the strangest results of having your name on a book jacket is the proliferation of people who know one narrow aspect of your life and are suddenly surprised to learn there's more.

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

Style is the most valuable asset of the modern artist. That's probably why so many styles are reported lost or stolen each year.

Readers are always surprised to learn that authors have little or no input regarding the cover art for their books.

Believe it or not, there were very few books on art, years ago.

Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with. They look like copies of paper, but they can't be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they're still images rather than physical things.

Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.

I wouldn't buy a book simply because I like the cover. I would pick it up. The jacket can call your attention to it. But in that sense, Oprah Winfrey is worth all the jackets in the world. A jacket is basically trying to do what she does all on her own.

Whether it's music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship - if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book.