But I'm more interested in why people are frightened by Jaws and why Jaws was such a hit than saying Spielberg's my main influence.
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.
When developing an idea, I remind myself not to start with compromise. I envision the ideal manifestation of the idea, as if I had no limits in resources, materials, or permission.
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!
My heroes were Dylan, John Lennon and Picasso, because they each moved their particular medium forward, and when they got to the point where they were comfortable, they always moved on.
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.
We can go on talking about racism and who treated whom badly, but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wallow in that or are you going to create your own agenda?
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.
