Silhouettes are reductions, and racial stereotypes are also reductions of actual human beings.

The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that's also what the stereotype does.

There's no diploma in the world that declares you as an artist—it's not like becoming a doctor. You can declare yourself an artist and then figure out how to be an artist.

If you're a Black artist, you could paint a wall of smiley faces, and someone will still ask you, 'Why are you so angry?'

Im not really about blackness, per se, but about blackness and whiteness, and what they mean and how they interact with one another and what power is all about.

I think really the whole problem with racism and its continuing legacy in this country is that we simply love it. Who would we be without the 'struggle?'

I don't think that my work is actually effectively dealing with history. I think of my work as subsumed by history or consumed by history.

Humor's always been the problem of my work, hasn't it? When working, I feel satisfied when I surprise myself. And when I surprise myself, I wind up laughing.

The promise of any artwork is that it can hold us - viewer and maker - in a conflicted or contestable space, without real-world injury or loss.

I have no interest in making a work that doesn't elicit a feeling.

As a child, I was subjected to a lot of spaghetti Westerns and hated them. I wanted the Indians to win - or just not be so sad!

It takes guts and humility to admit mistakes. Admitting we're wrong is courage, not weakness.

When we learn to loosen our grip and leave our own beaten path, accepting his perfect plan, we give God the opportunity to be our navigator as he reveals the beauty of his creation.

In religion as in politics it so happens that we have less charity for those who believe half our creed than for diose who deny the whole of it.

The future is much like the present only longer.

When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is.

Misfoutune always comes to those who wait. The trick is to find happiness in the breif gaps between distaters.

I write mostly in my office in the shed outside at home, but it can get very cold. I write best on the train, among people. As a writer you spend so much time away from people.

What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!

I was on Prozac for a long time. It may have helped me out of a jam for a little bit, but people stay on it forever.

I've never lived in the visual world. I live very much in an emotional-contact world.