Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

Everything I do is completely original-I made it up when I was a kid.

I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.

I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce.

My rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying; I was remaking them as my own.

I got a job as a dishwasher in Oakland, and I would draw all day. It was nice because the lady who ran the boardinghouse where I worked let me live there for nothing if I gave her some drawings every week - mostly park drawings of birds and such.

I'm always careful to say that I changed everything I found.