If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist. . . . Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit. . . We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating.
You dig in and you find something.
There is no communication with any public whatsoever. The artist can ask no question, and he makes no statement; he offers no information, and his work cannot be used. It is the end product which counts.
The idea of changing or improving the world is alien to me and seems ludicrous. Society functions, and always has, without the artist. No artist has ever changed anything for better or worse.
I don't like things that can be reproduced. Wood isn't important in itself but rather in the fact that objects made in it are unique, simple, unpretentious.
When Michael Werner saw a painting of mine, such as Die grosse Nacht im Eimer, which back then nobody wanted and everybody thought was ridiculous, he realized that this was the right provocation, that it represented the feeling of the times in the right way.
Unlike the expressionists, I have never been interested in renewing the world through the vehicle of art.
Maybe it's our sins that give God consolation when he finally has to give us cancer.
At Reed College, I learned very quickly that I didn't know nearly enough. I learned, first, that every student there was as smart as I was, and quite a few seemed smarter.
What I am is a thinking, feeling human being compelled by history.
When you sing gospel you have a feeling there is a cure for what's wrong.