I was never a lonely child who sat looking at the rain sliding down the window.

I have a hippopotamus skull next to my bed, called Gregory. When I was six, my three sisters and I clubbed together and paid £4 for it in a junk shop. We collected owl pellets, ostrich eggs and sheep skulls for our natural history museum at home.

Next to me she seems like a clean blackboard, whereas I am full of crossed-out scribbles that I can no longer decipher.

If the poet says that he can inflame men with love, which is the central aim in all animal species, the painter has the power to do the same, and to an even greater degree, in that he can place in front of the lover the true likeness of that which is beloved, often making him kiss and speak to it. – LEONARDO DA VINCI, Notebooks.

We use God to justify our actions when in fact it is our own instinct for survival that pushes us on.

Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow you, as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart. Speak or act with a pure mind and happiness will follow you, as your shadow unshakeable. Sayings of the Buddha.

After the storm the city lies becalmed. It is a sunny morning, still and cold. Branches litter the streets like broken limbs. People clear away the wreckage. They swarm around like ants whose anthill has been scuffed; how doggedly they rebuild their lives.

But you have to be courageous, my friend, and unafraid of pain. For only through pain will the beauty of the world be revealed.’’ He.

Art lies, to tell the truth. Flowers from different seasons bloom impossibly together. Trees are shifted around in the landscape to frame the composition. Rooms are created like stage sets, furnished with the artist’s own possessions, where models are arranged in a speechless moment of drama.

Your faith is like putty. How easily you mold it to your own desires.