I've been very fortunateit's just been an amazing piece of luck. I haven't had to suffer for my art but I've suffered enough inside to hopefully be called an artist.

I was always a happy kid. I'd play the piano fairly well. I did all sorts of things fairly well. But who the hell wants to be happy all the time? It's a miserable state to be in permanently. Can you imagine how dreary that would be?

A lot of people want to retire; I couldn't. You don't retire in our business. What, play golf and watch television? Oh, please.

Most of my life I have played a lot of famous people but most of them were dead so you have a poetic license.

I want to paint Montreal as a rather fantastic city, which it was, because nobody knows today what it was like. And I'm one of the last survivors, or rapidly becoming one.