“If you’ve ever had that feeling of loneliness, of being an outsider, it never quite leaves you. You can be happy or successful or whatever, but that thing still stays within you.”

“It’s great when you know somebody and they keep surprising you.”

“Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.”

“I never sort of really regret anything because you make your choices and I like to stand by them.”

“When I was a kid I always wanted to be a mad scientist. I don’t know, regular scientist just was no one.”

“Drawing is exercise for a restless imagination.”

“Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else’s dreams?”

“I’ve found that the people who play villains are the nicest people in the world and people who play heroes are jerks.”

“There’s something quite exciting when you have a history with somebody and you see them do new and different things.”

“I always wonder why some people see things as weird and some people don’t.”

“If I had a choice about going to a meeting at a studio or changing a nappy, I’d choose the nappy.”

“Once you get labelled, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Anybody who knows me knows I would never read a comic book.”

“I always felt that Hollywood has a way of making you feel outside.”

“Johnny Depp is somebody I really love working with because he doesn’t care how he looks. He wants to become weird characters and I like that.”

“My parents suffered from that ideal of a perfect nuclear family. They found that a difficult pressure, I think.”

“If you want people to leave you alone then appearing to be crazy is a good thing. If you’re walking down the street talking to yourself people tend to give you a wide berth! But I’ve always been blessed with being easily ignored or avoided. I think maybe it’s because people think I look a little crazy.”

“A lot of things you see as a child remain with you you spend a lot of your life trying to recapture the experience.”

“I don’t have a dog, because I travel too much. I don’t want to just leave it abandoned.”

“One person’s craziness is another person’s reality.”

“I always treated the science thing and the art thing as quite similar thematically.”

“It’s always an interesting challenge to see if you can create a character that’s got emotion.”

“I think a lot of kids feel alone and slightly isolated and in their own world.”

“My diagnosis,” he said “for better or worse, is that your son is the result of an old pharaoh’s curse.”

“But she knows she has a curse on her, a curse she cannot win. For if someone gets too close to her, the pins stick further in.”

“The Boy with Nails in His Eyes put up his aluminium tree. It looked pretty strange because he couldn’t really see.”

“You can learn a lot from children because they see things new every day. That’s the beauty of what you want to achieve as an artist – seeing things in a different way. Kids are constantly saying things that are funny and surprising and their observations are just… you know, they’re like little artists themselves.”

“We all know interspecies romance is weird.”

“I’ve always been more comfortable making my decisions from the subconscious level, or more emotionally, because I find it is more truthful to me; Intellectually, I don’t think like that because I get uncomfortable.”

“I was never interested in what everybody else was interested in. I was very interiorized. I always felt kind of sad.”

“I always liked strange characters.”

“I’ve always been misrepresented. You know, I could dress in a clown costume and laugh with the happy people but they’d still say I’m a dark personality.”

“Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that’s why we’re all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it’s actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.”

“I’m gonna go live in a cave, just completely live in my interior world.”

“Don’t worry about how you ‘should’ draw it. Just draw it the way you see it.”

“I like the challenge of doing things you know that you maybe shouldn’t do.”

“It’s hard to find logic in things sometimes. That’s why I can’t analyze things too much, because it often doesn’t make much sense.”