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Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.

Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

The paintings that really excite me have an erotic element or side to them irrespective of subject matter.

My early paintings weren't that good - I was very influenced by Francis Bacon. But there was a kind of intensity there. And however influenced they may have been by other people, even my earliest paintings were recognisably my own.

'Moby-Dick' has a remarkable way of resonating with whatever is going on in the world at that particular moment.

I'd much rather go to a Banksy art show than a Moby art show. My art is painfully naive.

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.

Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.'

My books were always full of ink blots, always stained and covered with smeared sketches and pictures, which one draws idly when his attention wanders from his task.