For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.

I think people have to be given - or take - the permission to say that something is nothing. Just because it's in a museum doesn't mean it's anything.

Being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you've never had it so good.

There were successful ways of expressing the attitude and less successful ways. I think that spirit is very much alive today actually. That's what a certain generation of curators is alert to or on the look out for: an attitude. And it is a brilliant and moving spectacle when it happens. That suspension of disbelief is something that we all respond to. But it's hard to capture the butterfly without tearing the wings off of it.

What great comedians, great comic writers, great comic actors do is that they just read the headlines with the right eyebrow position and it's funny.

I feel like it's not so much a tradition as a system that has been codified over the centuries starting in the Renaissance that applies to any painted surface. So if you're engaging in paintings, this is the language that one has to learn and is obliged to speak. I was very fortunate that I learned this language when I was a kid before I went to California, where I learned the language of attitude. Somehow the two things began to coexist.

The pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out.