When you're at your best, you're analyzing yourself and becoming increasingly isolated from a broader narrative.

I think there's something important in going against the grain, and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.

This is something that, as artists, we constantly deal with-throwing away the past, slaying the father, and creating the new. This desire to throw away the old rules.

The backgrounds by design are a very key part of the conversation, because I want a kind of fight or pressure to exist between the figure and the background.

All art is self-portraiture.

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.

The art world has become so insular. The rules have become so autodidactic that, in a sense, they lose track of what people have any interest in thinking about, talking about or even looking at.

We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.

We're wired to be empathetic and to care about the needs of others, but also to be curious about others. And I think that's just sort of in our DNA. And so portraiture is a very human act.

I guess art is in the eye of the beholder.

My life has become a dismal sigh fettered by pangs of grief and anguished weeping.

If my mom sees you here, she’ll ---“ “Paper the walls with my innards while the innocents watch?

Thieves for their robbery have authority When judges steal themselves.

When the whistle blew and the call stretched thin across the night, one had to believe that any journey could be sweet to the soul.

But I do not know whether the photograph can, or does, say things as they really are. Something has been lost. But the representation is all we have.

Patriotism is the vital condition of national permanence.

Obama's not ultimately gonna get away with totally destroying America. His damage already done is brutal and he's gonna do more and we're gonna have an incredible amount of hard work ahead of us.

As long as space abides and as long as the world abides, so long may I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world.

Nature is monumentally indifferent.