When someone tells you it’s a grain of sand, there’s a moment where your reality falls apart and you have to reconstruct it. You have to step back and ask what the image is and what it means.

The moment when one thing turns into another is the most beautiful moment. A combination of sounds turns into music. And that applies to everything.

It's not about fooling somebody, it's actually giving somebody a measure of their own belief: how much you want to be fooled. That's why we pay to go to magic shows and things like that.

My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.

Whenever I am tired of making photographs of drawings, I make drawings of photographs.

A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a little bit more intention, you see it.

I'm not creating art that starts with politics or starts with ethics. I feel I am a conceptual artist because my art is more concerned with epistemology than ethics or politics or even aesthetics.

The great challenge is how to make smart, intelligent art that can speak to everybody.

If you find an idea without form, please let me know because I would love to take a picture of it.

I think there's a gradient that goes from science to art and magic is the middle ground. I think that we're all trying to understand and define the world around us but often it's experimental.

Illusions as bad as mine make people aware of the fallacies of visual information and the pleasure to be derived from such fallacies.

Always find sense in your actions

I would have to say the power to heal. This show has enhanced my relationship to magic. I would have called it prayer. There are definitely certain incantations that I do now.

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.

Vice knows [its] ugly, so [it] puts on [a] mask.

Reform is Chinas second revolution.

Those who trade liberty for security have neither.

I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.

It is impossible for a man to be cheated by anyone but himself.

Then you've a hunch what the music meant . . . hunger and night and the stars.

Work is a search for daily meaning as well as for daily bread.