I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.

I knew I had to take my ambition more seriously, so I enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then, in the fall, I went on a tour of my own. I didn't go to New York because that was too well known for its art scene.

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

I knew I wasn't that good a writer, and all I could remember was that I could draw. I'm better at drawing than I am at writing.

When you're working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.

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.