What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.

American cities are kind of difficult contexts to work in. They are politically complex. There are a lot of different interest groups. It takes immense political skill to get anything done at all.

...people have always known, at least since Moses denounced the Golden Calf, that images were dangerous, that they can captivate the onlooker and steal the soul.

There is no magical solution because urban traffic congestion arises from the fact that a lot of people want to be in the same place at the same time often.

Exile is a series of photographs without texts.

Photography is and is not a language; language also is and is not a photography.

Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.

Somewhere at the top of the pyramid in the invisible government are a few sinister people who know exactly what they are doing: They want America to become part of a worldwide socialist dictatorship.

A word is worth a thousand pictures.

If you come to think of it, you never see deer, dogs and rabbits worrying about their menus and yet they run much faster than humans.

One of the ideas that runs through this book [Lincoln in the Bardo] is this Buddhist notion that the mind is incredibly powerful; not the brain but the mind.

My aim is to make the viewer become aware of his or her responsibility in what he or she is looking at.

Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to fill the mind. The two ideas are quite different

If I cannot give consent to my own death, whose body is this? Who owns my life?

I hate learning lines, so the fight stuff's always my favorite.

Making art is like swimming underwater in a blindfold.