Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

I've always felt that my subject was living in dangerous times.

Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

The future belongs to crowds.

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else.

Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn't begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We're doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It's their past, their history we're inventing here. And it's not how I look now that matters. It's how I'll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn't this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It's like a wake. And I'm the actor made up for the laying-out.