I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.

Some people think or expect that you should make the same kinds of art forever because it creates a convenient narrative... I want my work to embody my inherent contradictions.

The point isn't to know what you're doing. The point is to have an experience doing something.

I trust my work. It's a collaboration with the material, and when it's viewed, it's a collaboration with the world.

Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.

Making art is a lot about just seeing what happens if you put some energy into something.

Our culture seems to believe that it's entertaining to teach women to be frightened.

Prints mimic what we are as humans: we are all the same and yet every one is different. I think there's a spiritual power in repetition, a devotional quality, like saying rosaries.

One hopes that each piece contains enough space for several narratives.

It’s one of my loose theories that Catholicism and art have gone well together because both believe in the physical manifestation of the spiritual world.

I told the students [at Yale] we were going to talk about love - I meant love in the sense of devotions to one's work - and about half the students got really pissed off.

Most bad people are good people that don’t know how to think critically. These people become the blind weapons of a society.

For Jesus the home is not what defines the table

They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.

The most human thing we can do is comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

We're not descended from fearful men - not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

Hearing Oscar Peterson was something that resonated within me. There are so many musicians I've been fortunate to play with. The people that inspire me are the people I play with.

I have been coming to Los Angeles since 1975 to perform.

In closing, the greatest threat to peace on this earth is the arrogance of a super-power [America] that is out of control.

I don't want to be rude to the afflicted but Uncle Eddie is bald in a way which is the baldest I have ever seen.

Many things prevent knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life