I didn't know what I was gonna get the first time I sat down at a piano, but I loved it and it became my playmate for life.

There is an exercise I teach at colleges: Get yourself a canvas and a bunch of acrylics and go into a very dimly lighted room. Dip a brush into one of the colors, slap it on the canvas, don't look, close your eyes, make a painting, don't look, turn the lights on and see what you've got. I think this releases people from the editor in their life that's always standing over their shoulder saying, "Oh, you don't have any talent; who do you think you are?"

You have to sniff out joy. Keep your nose to the joy trail.

Every time somebody makes an Indian movie...Cher on a horse with a headdress and a miniskirt...the fashion industry cashes in.

Grab a guitar, put some kind of strings on it, a banjo string, then a violin string, then a guitar string, tune it any way you want, and make some noise, and see what you get. And work on it until you get something that you think is interesting. That's all there is to art for me.

There is so much joy in native culture but so much poverty. It's very disturbing.

The paintings are transferred from my computer to a disk, and I can hand it to the printer this way; or I can modem the painting to the printer over the phone lines from my house in Hawaii.