Hope is optimism with a broken heart.

Ultimately, we discover that disagreements frequently aren’t life-threatening, they are just differing perspectives, or, more often than that, colliding virtues.

There are obviously a multitude of reasons why people might choose to make art or music, but, as far as I’m concerned, the work I do is entirely relational, actually transactional, and has no real validity unless it is animated by others. It does not exist in its true form unless it moves through the hearts of others as a balm. Otherwise, it is

So do you feel that way about your songs, that they need protecting or defending once they are released? No, not so much, because a song is sent into the world and, if you’re lucky, it is absorbed into the bloodstream of the world. The audience takes stewardship of the song. The song becomes their property. I don’t see myself as the protector of my

hope that the sculptures are light enough at heart and sufficiently unassuming to ask this question: can we be forgiven? I think that question is fundamental to all our lives. In fact, it may be the question that our lives pivot around or, indeed, the whole world revolves around. Can we be forgiven?

There is a risk involved that generates a feeling of creative terror, a vertiginous feeling that has the ability to make you feel more alive, as if you are hotwired into the job in hand, where you create, right there, on the edge of disaster. You become vulnerable because you allow yourself to be open to failure, to condemnation, to criticism, but

Yes, but you learn in time that this is just nonsense. In fact, you learn all sorts of things: that personal chaos is not a necessary condition for creating good art; that the pram in the hallway is as much a source of inspiration as anything else; that being strung out on drugs doesn’t necessarily make you a better artist.

Arthur showed us that – the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world. Love, that most crucial, counter-intuitive act of all, is the responsibility of each of us.

Initially, you create solely for yourself in order to discover what you are. Your art places you in the world. This is very exciting – you feed off the world, off other artists, off your collaborators, off everything around you. By sucking up the world, you become full of potential and powerful with art. But at some point, for me at least, this