What I made depended on what I found on the street. At least in the beginning, my materials came from the street.

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.

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?

My works have always been unjoined. People were always making variations of my works, and I just said, "I don't want to know." You can't put limits on those pieces. You can't be there all of the time when they're installed.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.

Why carve? It's a better sculpture that way. I'll never improve the block. So I just started using uncarved blocks.