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.

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.

The artist has to be a guardian of the culture.

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.

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.

God loveth a cheerful giver.

There's a punk-rock attitude, clearly, to 'Hated.' There's even a punk-rock attitude to 'The Hangover, ' I think. We start the movie with a Glenn Danzig song.

There's such an odd, eclectic group of people that make up the town of Plymouth, New Hampshire. I don't think I could avoid not coming out of there with a pretty good sense of humor.

I dream of an Africa which is in peace with itself.

He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.

Most of what I do is for creative people - writers and painters and photographers - trying to work through creative problems.

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

How easy it was to lie when one had to lie!

When I was in high school, I wasn't a troublemaker. I didn't get in fights. I was a good student and I had a lot of friends.