In Mexico, muralism is an important part of the artistic vocabulary, and it has a very different place than it does in the US. Here, you see mainly commercial signage and dead slick graphic works, or murals that are incredibly narrative and littered with too much content - bad political art. But in Mexicali, all kinds of artists work with mural art. In Mexicali, the social practice of art existed in a completely authentic and unselfconscious way.

I think what makes you feel so connected with certain writers isn't a matter of autobiographical detail, but that the emotions are real. The way some writers are able to channel themselves through the form.

It's going to be crazy. All eight teams here are good teams. Hopefully the atmosphere will be great because it's going to be great basketball.

Nothing's ever entirely new. It's more a matter of what gets picked up from the past at each time.

Stalinism - or communism - is the only ideology Americans know how to demonise... no one knows what it is, it's just a synonym for the Empire of Evil.

Writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That 'art' is really 'artifact,' Exhibit A, Exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there's the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out.

Ask anyone who makes a full-length movie that's shown in the art world if they'd rather have a career as a film director or as an artist. Invariably, they'd rather be known as a film director, because that's what they are. But there's not really a system of independent distribution anymore that allows for that, and so the art world has kind of become all-enveloping. It's absorbed all of these disciplines that don't have a home anymore.