Whenever I've been well-known or hitting the press, I've always had to get my credit card out to prove I'm Damien Hirst.
I had a passport where I wrote 'artist' under 'occupation' and I remember thinking, 'That's it, it's proved!'
But the answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you're doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live.
Being able to draw means being able to put things in believable space. People who don't draw very well can't do that.
I'm a bit claustrophobic, I don't like crowds, I live by the sea - that's what I see when I come out of my house in Bridlington.
Television is becoming a collage - there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.
East Yorkshire, to the uninitiated, just looks like a lot of little hills. But it does have these marvelous valleys that were caused by glaciers, not rivers. So it is unusual.
I see the iPad as a wonderful new drawing medium, but I am at a loss as to how to make it pay.
I worked in the NHS as a hospital orderly during my national service, and people thought it was a noble service. But over the years it's lost its humanity.
Social issues have been used to distract Americans from their own self interests since Nixon's southern strategy, and now people are paying the price.
I think of a piece, and then people who are competent fabricate it. But lately I've started finger painting, which probably should be a joke but isn't!
I SAW THEIR STUNNING BODIES GO SLACK AND GET HAIR IN THE WRONG PLACES AND I VOWED I WOULD NOT PERMIT THAT TO HAPPEN TO ME.
HOW CONCISE THAT YOU CAN CRY FROM AWFUL WOUNDS, DESERTION, HAPPINESS, MEMORIES, HUMILIATION, DISAPPOINTMENT OR GRANDEUR.
I often find that having an idea in my head prevents me from doing something else. Working is therefore a way of getting rid of an idea.
The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.
I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.
I think you always, as an artist, feel like you would like to be more and more specific about your intent and your interests.
In 19th-century France, artists were part of government. Artists are very sensitive to their time. They're very thoughtful people - it makes sense to hear what they have to say.
We are not yet at the point where our size, our being the drama industry, is sufficient to support full time professional crews, and that is very very important.
They will open up to what I would call corporate broadcastings where the non-commercial material will have air time. There's no possibility of that here right now, none.
In this case we're building a corner to stretch a fence and hang a gate. It had a real purpose in the ranch here. I needed to do this. But at the same time, it made a beautiful structure.
