I suppose for me as an artist it wasn't always just about expressing my work I really wanted more than anything else to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

They are few in the midst of an overwhelming mass of brute force and their submission is wisdom but for a nation like England to submit to be robbed by any invader who chooses to visit her shores seemed to me to be nonsense.

When I was in Pulp I actively did more TV stuff because that was during the Great Britpop Wars and it seemed important to prove that indie people could speak. That war doesn't exist anymore.

The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

In the months leading up to World War II there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

I got this idea about being afraid to let go of something and being afraid of sinking into a state of almost anesthesia where you have to trust other people. Just the paranoia of it all. And it seemed to suit the frenetic track. So I just wrote it out and you know said it.

For many years it seemed as if nothing changed in Norway. You could leave the country for three months travel the world through coups d'etat assassinations famines massacres and tsunamis and come home to find that the only new thing in the newspapers was the crossword puzzle.

From a technical point of view there seemed to me to be absolutely no reason why - with the existing technology - we couldn't do very high quality audio because whereas the boom in digital graphics is ongoing the boom in digital audio has already happened.

I went to a Catholic high school and it seemed like every time I drew something for a class project it either got thrown away by the teacher or something.

The great dream merchant Disney was a success because make-believe was what everyone seemed to need in a spiritually empty land.