Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.

Art maybe the only space where an indvidual can be utterly free to question himself, as well as his relationship to his God

As a child I had no toys; our house was bombed, but there were lots of bricks. Ruins are wonderful because they are the beginning of something new, you can do something with them.

Because of my Calvinistic upbringing, I was trained to think that what you do has to have a purpose.

I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.

What does the artist do? He draws connections. He ties the invisible threads between things. He dives into history, be it the history of mankind, the geological history of the Earth or the beginning and end of the manifest cosmos.

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow.