What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime - terror

One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?

A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already

Red, of course, is the colour of the interior of our bodies. In a way it's inside out, red.

The work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story.

All ideas grow out of other ideas

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

If you get a bad review, you take that in your stride.

I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.

One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer

That freedom that Picasso afforded himself, to be an artist in a huge number of ways, seems to be a huge psychological liberation.

Kaitlyn froze and then said in a low tone, "That'd better be your gun." "Why yes, I always pack my gun where it'll blow my balls off."[Landon]

The passions of a revolution are apt to hurry even good men into excesses.

I could do what a lot of people are doing and that's sign the best Nicaraguan fighters and then sell them to Don King, but there's no way I'll do that.

Don't know which one is worse, doing your own thing or just being cool.

A dream is what you would like your life to become. A goal is what you are truly willing to do to achieve what you really want.

In all cases of heart-ache, the application of another man's disappointment draws out the pain and allays the irritation.

The artist's task is not to alter the world as the eye sees it into a world of aesthetic reality, but to perceive the aesthetic reality within the actual reality. (On photographs by Helen Levitt)

Mercy Watson is pure fun for me as a writer, because I think of her as kind of sorbet - a palate cleanser - between larger works. It's always a relief to come back to her.

having too many ideas is not always a good thing.

I think my brain is full of collisions and that's how I like to read and process information. I'm always comparing things and I think I do that subconsciously when I'm reading books of poetry.