When I was in college, I spent a summer working in London. I'd enjoyed tea before that, but then I got actual, really good tea there and never looked back.
Someone had told me about a house in Wandsworth, southwest London - 21 Blenkarne Road - with an incredible garden, so I went and had a look. I walked in and just said, 'I want it.'
This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
After living in LA for 8 years, I sort of wanted a change, but there's not much production in New York, which is where I primarily live, so I just sort of drifted over to London.
I travel Europe every couple of weeks. I just came back from London, Holland and Denmark. Every nation on this planet has its issues with race, and I am not sure if everyone has figured out how to deal with it.
Even if a university should turn out to be another version of a school, I had decided I could lose myself afterwards as an anonymous particle of the London I already loved.
In spite of holidays when I was free to visit London theatres and explore the countryside, I spent four very miserable years as a colonial at an English school.
The young Japanese, especially, love to wear the latest thing and when they come to London they head for my shops as part of what they want to find in Britain.
There was no real fringe theatre in London until way after the war, so either a play was done secretly with a club licence or it was done openly and had to be assessed along with everything else.
There's all this stuff that is happening in Edinburgh now, it's a sad attempt to create an Edinburgh society, similar to a London society, a highbrow literature celebrity society.
I finished my studies in England, I opened my studio in London, and the first one-man exhibit I had on Bond Street, which was opened by the Austrian ambassador.
