I used to jokingly say, "I don't teach art. I'm an art doctor." Students come to me and say, "My art's sick," and we help them make it well.

If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn't do art.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

I think art, if it's meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.

Talent is cheap, you have to be possessed or obsessed, rather. You really have to feel like you cannot not do art, and that is something you can't will.

Look at the subject as if you have never seen it before. Examine it from every side. Draw its outline with your eyes or in the air with your hands, and saturate yourself with it.

I will not make anymore boring art.

A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE

I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter and I'm sort of reporting.

Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?

I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?

A busy life is filled with tremendous emptiness.

The single most sacred pilgrimage you will ever make is the one right where you are.

You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home.

Loneliness is like being the only person left alive in theuniverse, except that everyone else is still here.

I got into filmmaking in order to tell very personal stories, and in this day and age, the opportunity seems all the more precious.

The girl traced the outline of her lover's shadow so she would always have a record of how he looked.

We only have to recall the color of the faces of those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans.

I love doing club shows. I love that tight sound.

The quality of life decreases with heightened security.

God knows, I'm no the thing I should be, Nor am I even the thing I could be.