The thing is you don’t always get the opportunity to do what you really want to do. I must say it’s difficult to get your own projects underway.

I’m interested in locating the holy grail of the minimum means to express the most complex ideas.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

The latest page I’ve been working is about the organization of the pantheon of the gods. Who’s indebted to whom, how they are related, who screwed whose uncle or grandmother, all of that.

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

I’m interested in how artists and writers do this, using art as therapy. Escaping into the worlds we create. We’re all victims and few of us are truly free.

And um, when I came back to England I put a very complex soundtrack on it, featuring everyone from Jimi Hendrix, right through to Neil Diamond, you know, everybody that was kind of popular who...

A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy.

They did offer me a chance of being a V in the crowd, but it’s not my scene. I think they just thought it would be fun for me to do that, but I don’t...

I’m just interested in meditating on certain ideas, and I like to draw: that’s my way of thinking.

So the whole of war, when you look at it is probably run by professional soldiers, and the rest of them are just recruits, or people who are just forced to join the army.

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject’s turned into the picture.

The music videos allow us to do whatever we want, but the budgets are always really tiny. The commercials have real dollars behind them.

I don’t look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It’s much easier to get near their paintings.

I’m interested in why people compromise when they shouldn’t. It comes back to what V’s about in a sense. We’ve all got ideals, but given the right circumstances, we’ll forget about them and put them...

Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement these visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into a complete tyranny.

And when Roger talks about the frightened ones running away from the bombs, I immediately thought of my days when I was young and I had to wear these gas masks.

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

V is like a mythical situation. It’s an allegory for what could happen. V has philosophies within it that actually warn against things like that happening.

I’m not an expert, but I want to be.

So war is an extremely sad business, because the majority of people don’t want to be in it.

I don’t think you can lightly paint a picture. It’s an activity I take very seriously.

They arranged for me to go to The Royal Academy, to study with one of the best life drawing professors in the world. That’s how I learned.

I don’t really have a historical overview of my work at all. I’m not an art historian. I don’t see that there’s this period and that period.

I’m lucky. I’m quite popular in this business and people know me. Most of the time there’s somebody that wants me to do something.

At this present time, matter is still the best way to think of architecture, but I’m not so sure for very long. The computer is radicalizing the way we think about our world.

But on the broader issues, the injustices in the world. You know, that would be something pretty much anyone would agree on I guess.

Collecting has been my great extravagance. It’s a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I’m one of nature’s shoppers.

When we were talking about this, an idea for this master vigilante, it was an urban guerilla. One of my ideas was that he would be a member of the police force who turned on...

If you’re into architecture and you’re from the West, everything is hors d’oeuvres for working to rebuild the Temple. Ultimately you’re led there. You can’t escape it.

So when I make my drawings, although I may not be consciously basing it on somebody or basing it on my experiences, I expect to a certain extent I am.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

Very rarely are we directing or cutting someone else’s boards. We concept, direct, shoot, animate and edit almost everything that comes through here.

I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category. I can only be me.

I’ve always been a liberal and I’ve always had strong socialist leanings.

I deeply believe in pluralism. I believe in the close proximity of multiple systems or agnostic systems.

England was incredibly dull and everything exciting seemed to be in America.

I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.

You are not going to get peace with millions of armed men. The chariot of peace cannot advance over a road littered with cannon.

It’s difficult to find a house with no map at 3 o’clock in the morning in a foreign country and where you don’t speak the language.

So, I created these creatures called The Frightened Ones which in the film you see do have mask like kind of heads and they run beneath the ground to hide. Which is what in fact...

We spend more time developing means of escaping our troubles than we do solving the troubles we’re trying to escape from.

We are pushing hard to find quality advertising clients.

I hate painting.

If you’re working as a team, not just as an individual artist, you need to both have your creative freedom, it’s very important.

I feel most strongly about Jerusalem, because architects ultimately have to address that city.

How do I feel about war? Well anybody I guess, I hope, I don’t like it.

In England, it’s thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.