Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works.

As a cartoonist, I am not interested in defending the dominant, the powerful, the well-resourced and the well-armed because such groups are usually not in need of advocacy, moral support or sympathetic understanding; they have already organised sufficient publicity for themselves and prosecute their points of view with great efficiency.

So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves.

At the age of nine, I simultaneously fell in love with two Dutch sisters because they seemed so beautifully strange, and their clothes were mysterious and alluring - added to which, they could not speak a word of English. More than anything, I wanted to connect with them and embark on a vast journey of exploration.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.

I think that no human gets away unscathed in this old life. We've all experienced loss and grief and pain and tragedy.

In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, Botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.