Typically your work will end up in a museum [after] you're dead. And maybe that's the function of a museum. It's an archive of your work after you're dead.

If I do a picture, I want the audience to be the people I was just packed against on the subway or on the street, walking on Fourteenth Street. I don't want it to be some narrow public that I myself feel alienated from.

Art is one of the few places where you can put it in a constructive way where it won't burn you up inside or hurt anyone.

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

The problem with prostitution in my experience is that it's often unsatisfying.

Artists always live in the cracks anyway, whatever culture they're in. They're usually accustomed to not having much money, to kind of roughing it.

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.