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.

Being bad. Discomfort with your body. Bad self image. All those things turn you into an artist. The same things that keep you from being in a proper marriage.

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.

I make paintings really slowly because I change them and change them and change them and change them and change them. I don't really know how to not do that. I'm not very free in a way. Even though it looks free. But it's not.

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."

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.

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.