The place of the arts in the classroom is essential in encouraging invention, ambition, and an understanding of the importance and pleasures of living an examined life.

I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become.

I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.

Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It's because I understand short attention spans.

I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.

GIVE YOUR BRAIN AS MUCH ATTENTION AS YOU DO YOUR HAIR AND YOU'LL BE A THOUSAND TIMES BETTER OFF.

I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I'm not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don't do it. I'm not crazy about categories.

It's good to keep in mind that prominence is always a mix of hard work, eloquence in your practice, good timing and fortuitous social relations. Everything can't be personalized.

Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.

I think what I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience.

I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

Republics are brought to their ends by luxury; monarchies by poverty.

My dad has always been extremely supportive in every decision I've made and much more interested in me picking what I wanted to do.

A truly comic, invented world must live at the same time as the world we live in.

Telling it like it is means telling it like it was and how it is now that it isn't what it was to the is now people.

It is the talent of human nature to run from one extreme to another.

My parents came from different backgrounds. My father's was grander than my mother's, so my mother had... to put up with the disapproval of my father's relations.

I never wanted to look pretty on stage and sing about something we've all heard about before.

Music is the love of my life. It’s a total escape from reality. Music transports you to another place, someplace unexpecet and meaningful.

It was easier to be brave when someone needed your protection.

A woman's best qualities do not reside in her intellect, but in her affections. She gives refreshment by her sympathies, rather than by her knowledge.