I think I am becoming obsessive-compulsive. David Beckham apparently turns all the Diet Coke cans in his fridge to face the same way every morning, and I nerdily sharpen all the pencils in my pot before sitting down to work.

I'm impressed by the way some illustrators develop their images on computers, but it's too late for me to start, and I'm still in love with paper and paint and pencils.

Well, painting is the one thing I do, that is just me. It's me and easels, and the pencils. And as long as I don't drool too much over the canvas, the colors come out pretty good. And it's a chance to express all that I've got inside, that I sometimes keep hidden. And I think that's why I paint big broad, wide open landscapes.

I was quiet, a loner. I was one of those children where, if you put me in a room and gave me some crayons and a pencils, you wouldn't hear from me for nine straight hours. And I was always drawing racing cars and rockets and spaceships and planes, things that were very fast that would take me away.

That's the very reason they put rubbers on the end of pencils... because people make mistakes.

We are all pencils in the hand of God.

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

I had never walked on the street alone when I was growing up in Calcutta up to age 20. I had never handled money. You know there was always a couple of bodyguards behind me who took care if I wanted... I needed pencils for school I needed a notebook they were the ones who were taking out the money. I was constantly guarded.