If you make a street poster and literally paste it on the street in a city like New York, where it's such a mixed population and so densely populated, and it stays up for a full week and doesn't get covered up by something else or pulled down, you will have fifty thousand people who will have seen it. It will be the poorest of the poor - some homeless man who lives on the street will see it and probably appreciate it, or some businessman or landlord will see it. Everyone will see it. And whether or not they even realize that they saw it, on some level it's affecting their consciousness.

Illustrators are usually illustrating something big or commercial if not outright advertising. It's a form of prostitution, but that's cool because we don't have any moral hang-up about it.

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.

With what we've been taught is the proper role of art, which is that you want to have it very neatly matted and framed and put on a white wall in some room where only a certain class of people are going to go in.

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.

We had collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on one of his last projects just before he died in the spring of '97, a book called Illuminated Poems - it was Allen's poems and songs and I illustrated them. Or, I illuminated them with paintings and drawings that bounced off of them. You want the picture to relate to the text without it slavishly regurgitating it or merely illustrating it, because that's redundant. You want to show another angle of what the text is saying.

I think for an artist there are so many things to make pictures of now, that everyone else may be suffering, but at least artists will just be stimulated by it all.