The works have to look like they're confident. But they also have to look sort of troubled. It's this weird thing: "Does that look confident and troubled?" It's a bit like difficult poetry.

A lot of what I do in my work is taking a thing and either washing it off, scraping it, covering it, scraping it and then washing it, turning it upside down. Making it somehow blind.

All accidents and experiments, and discoveries, are what my work is about. The problem that I have as an artist is being way too critical.

You can make a beautiful thing, but there's no problem in it. I like the idea of doing a thing, wrecking a thing, questioning a thing to the point where you have pushed it to the edge, and then recuperating it.

I made silk screens of my drawings. I could add a drawing that was made with a machine or digitally to a drawing that was made by hand. What I love is that you can't tell how they're made. For some reason, fooling the eye really excites me.

At some point, I get a weird feeling, and that's when I know it's done. I probably ruin a lot of really perfectly fine things. So part of working on paper, and trying to work really fast, is to see if I can expand the area of not being driven by taste. Not saying, "This looks good, I'll stop."

Who would be an artist that was perfectly happy? Maybe nowadays, but when I grew up in the '60s, you had nobody in the art club who was popular. No cheerleaders in the art club. I was told that I couldn't be a painter by my first painting teacher. I said I wanted to go to Cooper and be an art student, and he said, "You'll be a waitress." It was really the strangely indifferent parenting.