I know where I'm coming from; I know what I bring and what I take. I take more than I bring; I bring hope, but I give nothing. That's not the role I'm proud of.

Photography belongs to a fraternity of its own. I was young and enthusiastic and wanted to take good pictures to show the other photographers. That, and the professional pride of convincing an editor that I was the man to go somewhere, were the most important things to me.

I was dyslexic and uneducated and left school at 14. I grew up in Finsbury Park, which was a pretty bad place where you had to fight and be beaten. It was just a constant roundabout of violence.

I started out on photography accidentally. A policeman came to a stop at the end of my street, and a guy knifed him at the end of my street. That's how I became a photographer. I photographed the gangs that I went to school with.

I've accentuated the look over the years. As a comic, you try something and if it works you go with it and grind it to death.

I know the pride of carrying our nation's flag abroad - and I have felt the grief of burying too many friends beneath that flag at home.

The mysteries of death and birth occupy women far more than is the case with men, to whom political and mercantile speculations are more congenial.

No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.