I am preoccupied with the possibility of creating art which functions in a public situation without compromising its private character of being antiheroic, antimonumental, antiabstract, and antigeneral. The paradox is intensified by the use on a grand scale of small-scale subjects known from intimate situations--an approach which tends in turn to reduce the scale of the real landscape to imaginary dimensions.

Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.

I had, over the years, collected things, small things, as people do, and I had put them all together and showed them in what became a building in the form of the Geometric Mouse.

The sexual is part of everything, and it's highly formalized. I hadn't done figure for a long time. And I thought to myself, "Why not the erotic figure?"

I was always interested in drawing. As a child, I started my own country, which was called Neubern. It was located in the South Atlantic. I did the documentation of Neubern in great detail. I drew everything that was there, all the houses and all the cars and all the people. We even had a navy and an air force. I spent a lot of time drawing.

Food is like clay; you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.

I just started to do my own thing for about a year and a half, and I worked in the evening selling phonograph records. Then I said to myself, "I'm afraid I have to go to New York after all."