The viewer brings all additional information to the image.

'Understanding' art is like having a sense of humour - if you don't have one, no amount of explanation is going to make you laugh.

I thought the objects we value least because they were ubiquitous were actually the most extraordinary.

I try to make images that have the immediate presence we take for granted in objects - a chair, a shoe, a book, a Judd - and compose them like sentences.

You can see in my paintings, I've taken away the context, I've taken away the shadows, I've taken away expression, I've taken away the personal, and yet so much remains!

The art world, of all worlds, has room for everyone.

I am trying to present objects in the simplest way possible, and I don't want to supply too much context.

Whatever happens to the art world, art will go on regardless. As for obscurity, it looms just over the horizon beckoning us all. Why worry.

I think the best approach is not to be too much like the thing that they are referring to, see it as a guide.

Art is more to do with observation than invention.

If things are too similar, the dialogue is not very interesting. If you put in contrast, big and small, abstract and representational, you set up the possibility of a discourse.

Behind a life of influence you will find a masterful storyteller.

There are moments when we think nature happens just for us, and there are other moments when the ridiculousness of that notion is revealed.

Emma is a mattress who got thrown off the truck when her parents split up. It's not like you can blame a mattress when people don't tie it down tight enough.

If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.

It's the height of folly to want to be the only wise one.

In chess the rules are fixed and the outcome is unpredictable, whereas in Putin's Russia the rules are unpredictable and the outcome is fixed.

When we pray with our hearts and our souls I think we are being heard.

Never mind manoeuvres, always go at them.

By touching you may kill, by keeping away you may possess.

I am an emotional plagiarist, stealing other people's pain, subsuming it into my own until I can't remember whose it is any more.