At times we would have these whole cities that would take up rooms and stretch out all over the house. But they were also very abstract, like 'this piece of cardboard is a pool' and so forth.

This idea of repetition and revision is central to my working process-this idea of stacking and layering and building up densities and recoveries.

Artists know that you can take an advertising sign and make something joyful with it. It's sometimes hard for people who don’t make things to understand labor and joy and attention and whimsy.

The things that separate the planes are the incisions and the edges of the matter. Each separate layer of cutting or painting is visible and readable as an edge.

The protocols of science fiction and the protocols of science are not separate-they'r e woven together.

I like radically cutting into the painting, inserting these paper birds, and then trying to figure out how to believe in it.

The vast and beautiful world is the home we share together.

There are a lot of funny things that happen in one's life.

We should not be pushing out figured when the facts are in the opposite direction.

You can't just read the Koran to understand Muslim life. You have to look at history, at personalities, at economics, and so on.

I draw and play the piano badly. But when I’m doing those things, I’m concentrating so hard there’s no room for worry. I find that onstage, too.

Young people refuse the notion that financialization defines the only acceptable definition of exchange, one that is based exclusively on the reductionist notion of buying and selling.

...the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world's collective non-white man.

Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see.

Sometimes I ask myself whether [Indira Gandhi] had, even then, a certain contempt for the system she represented and, years later, would overthrow.

What is civilization? I answer, the power of good women.