All that stuff about flatness - it's this idea that painting is a specialized discipline and that modernist painting increasingly refers to painting and is refining the laws of painting. But who cares about painting? What we care about is that the planet is heating up, species are disappearing, there's war, and there are beautiful girls here in Brooklyn on the avenue and there's food and flowers.

Cool to me is following what you believe in.

As an artist, one doesn't know what is real. And so there's a search and a process of trying to locate something that feels or appears or somehow resonates with us on a deeper level. This is why art is such an interesting business to be in.

You can never say you're big - I don't think you can ever take anything like that for granted.

I don't think you have to struggle to make good art. I think you have to be passionate to make good art. You have to believe in what you're doing. It just comes from when you lie awake at night.

When the lights go down, that's 30,000 peoples lives colliding. Everyone there working is working for that moment, everyone watching is watching for that moment. It's when you're all in agreement about what you're all doing so it's a wonderful feeling of togetherness and possibility.

There's this idea that artists are free and that means that we can do whatever we want to do. And it's very important to engage with this idea, just as human beings, that we are free to do what we wanna do. So the real question becomes, then, what do we wanna do? And as one gets to know oneself, one finds that there are things that return again and again that you wanna do.