Chris Ofili

“I don't think I met anyone posh until I went to London.”

“I love Manchester. I love Manchester United. But I would really struggle to be creative there. I feel a bit lost, over-familiar maybe. Maybe too stuck in my own web of history.”

“I've always found music inspired me in the studio to try to do new things. If someone comes out with a new album, it's like, 'Gosh, they've been working hard - so should I.'”

“I've always set out to embrace all that I am.”

“The church is not made up of one person but a whole congregation, and they should be able to interact with art without being told what to think.”

“Often I think changes within my work have been seen as sudden changes or sharp changes, but for me they're not that sudden. They have been there in the studio, but not so much in public.”

“Doubt is important because it suggests progress. Total certainty can mean there's no assessment of things. Doubt, if you don't panic, can allow newness to come in and challenge something that's an established mode.”

“There's a magic that comes from playing entirely to who you are. I've got my specialist subject - in the Mastermind sense - and I wouldn't change it, or who I am.”

“Sometimes, as I feel a door or an exit point in my work is closing, I'll try to create an opening so as not to stifle the creative process, which I see as a process that's never-ending.”

“Love is a blissful state, but it's not a utopia.”

“I was an altar boy and heard the Bible being read out repeatedly. The stories have stayed with me, although they're completely remixed in my head. And often, when I do further reading, I'm quite surprised by the difference between the real story and my memory of the story.”

“When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.”

“Trinidad was an opportunity to start all over again, to have another stab at it. The mystery and atmosphere of the place have entered my palette a lot more than I thought they would.”

“The Notorious B.I.G.'s album 'Ready to Die' is an incredible chart of a man's life - it begins with his birth, you hear his mother giving birth, and it goes through the decades.”

“Change is not indecision.”

“I don't quite know how the urban music category came about, but I suspect it had something to do with trying to maximise sales.”

“A lot of what Trinidad is about is the feeling of the place, the atmosphere of the place, particularly at night, and the mystery of the forest.”

“There was a point in time where the thought of people even talking about me made me anxious. Physically.”

“I believe in God, but I'm not dominated by it.”

“The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.”