The world is imperfect, and young people are always trying to perfect it and they always fail - which is a good thing. Who'd want to live in a perfect world?

I never drove a car in my life. Given my drinking habits in those days, I would have been dead a long time ago - stumbling out of a bar at 4 a.m. and getting into a car.

You can always find somebody to beat up. This goes back to the schoolyard. Most men would think, Don't chum with girls. But I chummed with girls.

SoHo was called Hell's Hundred Acres because it was full of sweatshops - without fire escapes. Completely not up to code. Every once in a while, these buildings would burn and 26 Puerto Ricans would be killed.

I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.

If you're any good as an artist, you have to be doing something nobody else has interest in. Nobody would be interested in my work except a few crazy people.

Once you turn something into something, its universal usage is over.