I forget how beautiful and calm California is. It's not so much about the place, but also the age that I came to the place and, well, other things. New York is hard.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

I don't write to put it in a drawer, I hope that people see it.

People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.

I'm not searching for the truth.That's too much pressure .

Why are the mainstream buzz things rarely contemporary? It doesn't happen very often. It's hard to feel culpable or implicated or even apathetic.

I think there's nothing new going on. Except that, you're even more public than you've ever been.There's some good and some bad to that.

If New York is the City That Never Sleeps, then Los Angeles is the City That's Always Passed Out on the Couch.

It's so hard to say what you really mean. For any number of reasons: to protect yourself, or if you just can't find the words.

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

In The Sellout I tried to capture how we can talk and see race, how we see urbanity, and how we see our history.

Love pouring out of you is evidence of God pouring into you.

A good husband should always bore his wife.

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

As long as we think we own anything, that thing owns us. As soon as we know that we own nothing, then God owns us.

The dynamic, creative present, however conditioned and restricted by the effects of prior presents, possesses genuine initiative.

It seems strange that some artists fear a blank canvas, when it has been a major contributory factor to great paintings.

Love and sacrifice are closely linked, like the sun and the light. We cannot love without suffering and we cannot suffer without love.

Each one of these bodies (art-works Arp made) certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.

Reaching 50, I've started to conjure up thoughts of my own mortality.

Is still fulfilling its social function in supplying the consumers with more, better and cheaper goods.