I really just want to be an inspiration. I'm a regular guy, that had a dream, that came from a small town, that wanted to play guitar and just liked playing. I want to encourage people.

Black painters have done all kinds of work. It's the treatment of forms they engage in-that's what determines the value of the work, not whether you call them a black artist or not.

I think the museum should be an arena in which ideals can hash it out, fight it out, tooth and nail, for attention.

No one has a right to occupy the privileged position all the time, so it should be contested. It should always be messy in there.

I came in making choices about how I deploy aesthetics and imagery strategically. It seems to me that's the only legitimate way of making work.

Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.

Comics were a place where captivating images lit your imagination and showed you that you can create new kinds of people and worlds.

In some places you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive. I also take into account historical realities that some of this range in color is the legacy of white supremacy.

The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry.

I want people to understand that this is a very calibrated image [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], where point by point, very little is left to chance.

Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.

Nobody steals books but your friends.

It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

Positive thinking is sword of life.

The highest creed is Universal Acceptance.

No thought, no action, no movement, total stillness: only thus can one manifest the true nature and law of things from within and unconsciously, and at last become one with heaven and earth.

Iranians defend and present their Islamic and Iranian identity to other people worldwide.

The body is some kind of image of you, it's kind of something that's just attached to your soul, some kind of outside principle, which doesn't really represent who you really are.

The science [geometry] is pursued for the sake of the knowledge of what eternally exists, and not of what comes for a moment into existence, and then perishes.

At the core, we're all spiritual beings.

All is forgiven to kings and popes. History grants them immunity, even a full pardon, even when they admit their crimes and glory in them.