I love to see a wood full of bluebells. Growing up in the Kent countryside, I have special memories of this brief annual spectacle.

I lived on nothing for years - squatted where I lived and where I worked, stole electricity, made things from stuff I found in skips, used paper that had been discarded - you do everything you can do to keep going and not have to get a job.

It's not part of my ambition to become fabulously rich. My plan was always to make my pictures, and hopefully people would buy them, and then I'd buy a studio, buy a house, help friends out, do bits and bobs - but I've no idea after that.

Small paintings can be fantastic. But you can't often get a narrative out of a small painting. In any case, museums are huge places, and you want to take up some space.

I'm really annoyed by the wave of country music that's just a list of stuff. It almost sounds like L.A. people writing country music, because it's just a list of stuff: 'My pickup truck and my cowboy boots and my Levi's jeans and my girlfriend with the short shorts.' It's so boring!

I'm an artist, and I love the visual. Fashion is high art sometimes and hack work other times, but it's something worthy of study and love.

Writing is more important than being a writer.

For me, a story begins with music: I feel the rhythm, the cadence, the pulse of the characters and their voices and the setting. Because I had just finished writing a book called 'Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine,' I was already filled with the music of the lives and culture of the Irish people, so I thought, why not use it?