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!

'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.

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.

If you close the door to the things you feel comfortable with, you will never discover the truth about yourself.

I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.

We priests are the surgeons of souls, and it is our duty to deliver them of shameful secrets they would fain conceal, with hands careful to neither wound no pollute.

When you're the best, you only want to surround yourself with the best.

Nothing we do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.

Well, I'm reading about the battle of New Orleans right now. I've got an eclectic reading list.

The part I remember best is the beginning.

I think that one of the questions that I asked of myself in later years was to this point of the political directive.

As lower-cost phones begin to penetrate, they'll become the educator and physician everywhere on the planet.

by and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them

Any idiot can see something wrong. But can you see what is right?