The client isn't quite satisfied and then the prostitute is always unsatisfied but is doing it just to make ends meet. And if you're doing fine art, if you're doing it for a gallery or a museum, it's so sterilized. It's such an antiseptic environment.

As I developed as an artist and studied art history, I noticed that all the great works were dealing with the human condition. [Art] had humor in it. It had sex in it. But it also had sorrow running through it.

Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly.

There's so much tragedy in people that we see every day that we don't have to make anything up. We don't have to invent anything. There are two items on the menu: comedy and tragedy.

Doing art that has a happy ending, that doesn't seem really corny, is extremely difficult to pull off convincingly.

By the time I was in my early-twenties and was living there on the Lower East Side, I was so surrounded by tragedy that I think that inspired me to try to reflect it in the artwork.

I find it very difficult to be funny, it's much easier to do tragedy than it is to do comedy.