The artist has to be a guardian of the culture.

An artist should know art history. Shock value only lasts so long.

It's weird making a drawing of painting. I start to realize that charcoal is this incredibly fragile material. I'm making images of paintings out of dust.

An artist can have an intention, but the viewer has their own subjective experience.

When I look back on everything I've done, it all somehow makes sense to me. But it doesn't make sense when you're actually doing it.

If you're fortunate enough with your history, like with Men in the Cities, your work becomes so absorbed in culture that the authorship of it doesn't exist anymore.

The translation process becomes a highly subjective thing - turning reds and blues into black-and-whiteness. It's really bizarre for me.

I'm trying to find answers. It can be quite frustrating, but at the same time, I'm never quite satisfied with what I'm doing, so I'm always looking for the next thing.

There are no guidelines for what happens when you get successful as an artist. My heroes were artists like Acconci, and he didn't make any money. That's what I thought success was.

A lot of us grew up in public. That often means that you have to fail in public too.

I've been dealing with epic images, and I realized all of a sudden that I grew up in the age of epics.

They be marching hand in hand, like going to war.

When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it's actually you that's time-shifted?

I was often getting hired to play sociopaths and psychopaths and stuff, which is really funny.

When watching after yourself, you watch after others. When watching after others, you watch after yourself.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

Someone once asked me what was the weirdest question I was ever asked. And I was stymied.

Cleverness becomes a public nuisance.

School reports were always pretty bad - I never ever did my homework. I always turned up for lessons as I liked my teachers but my report said I didn't try very hard.

I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.