If I'm not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill. It niggles when things get out of my control.

I've done some collaborations which have ended up like Chinese whispers, but the most successful was with Tilda Swinton... Together we transcended our previous work and made something better together than we could have done apart.

The main trouble with this civilized world isn't that we adventure too much, but that we fail to adventure enough.

There's such a freedom about being an artist... You're not accountable - you're this renegade thing.

When people asked to buy my work I always said no. I'd had this rather rarefied idea that I didn't want money going through my head while I was making work. But after the car crash I realized that none of my work was owned by anyone. After that, I grew up a bit.

not only have children most certainly a right to their own ambitions, but their own lack of ambitions.

Heaven grants the human being who has learned to live alone a deep measure of such rewards that verily would one hesitate to sacrifice such proved satisfactions, such rare unending possibilities of contentment for anything less than certainty more certain still.

Trout fishing is like any other sport. It is waste of words to try to give anyone who has never tried it any idea of what it means to land a five-pound trout on a gossamer leader.

New York, forever the port of em- and de-barkation en route to Adventure.

There's only a certain amount of works you can make, so you have to make only the ones you really want to make. It's all about trying to be as productive as possible.

You make an open-ended proposition and the audience completes it somehow. That’s what you hope an artwork to be-a constantly living thing.