My aim in PAINTING has always been the most EXACT transcription POSSIBLE of my most intimate impression of NATURE.

The American DREAM has RUN out of gas. The CAR has stopped. It no longer supplies the WORLD with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its NIGHTMARES now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. CERTAIN THEMES KEEP coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and SOCIAL issues, freedom.

We don't have to kind of be in cycles of conflict if we can FIND other ways to resolve these issues. We can do things that challenge the conventional thinking that, you know, 'AIPAC doesn't LIKE this,' or 'the ISRAELI government doesn't like this,' or 'the Gulf countries don't like it.' It's the possibility of IMPROVED relations with adversaries.

I'm a great DOG fanatic. My own dog DIED a little while ago and I TAKE it very personally when things DIE - it's a MAJOR offence.

One of the most pervasive POLITICAL visions of our TIME is the vision of liberals as COMPASSIONATE and CONSERVATIVES as less caring.

I saw a crow building a NEST, I was watching him very CAREFULLY, I was kind of stalking him and he was AWARE of it. And you know what they do when they BECOME aware of someone stalking them when they build a nest, which is a very VULNERABLE place to be? They build a decoy nest. It's just for you.

The further AWAY we got from 9/11, the more I WANTED to find some way to RECOVER. I wanted to talk about the more anonymous corners of the city, because I THINK it's very important that not all of that anger was turned to REVENGE.

The best THING about New York is working LATE into the night. At 1 in the morning on a Saturday, to be still working, there's an IMMENSE satisfaction in being enclosed by it.

What the United STATES does BEST is to understand itself. What it does WORST is understand OTHERS.