Destroy or build. Crazy or noncrazy. I'm not nostalgic about the old city. I don't enjoy it that much.

A small act is worth a million thoughts.

I saw [Allen Ginsberg] more as an old man who liked poetry and who had a lot of physical and emotional problems. We liked our time together.

I don't belong to a working system. They only select people if you belong to one so you can be controlled.

I think the pearls - one is a necklace, and another you have five hundred pounds of pearls, which may be one million pearls in a bowl - really show a kind of [society] condition.

I never felt like a Chinese citizen because I was pushed away at a very young age. My father, a writer, was a national enemy of the Communist Party. He was forbidden to write for 20 years. We literally lived underground. We dug a hole and lived there for years. My father cleaned public toilets, even though he was a highly respected poet. Nationality and borders are barriers to our intelligence, to our imagination and to all kinds of possibilities.

To call yourself a Chinese artist or woman artist or African artist reflects a certain kind of condition. To me, that is not necessary.