When Allen Ginsberg was still alive, he was was an artist, but he was very local. He was just another wing-nut in the neighborhood and he was very accessible. You'd see him in Tompkins Square Park or in the local delicatessen, in one of the greasy spoon restaurants on First Avenue or a Chinese restaurant.

Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, "the question should be, what isn't political? Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly." I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.

Infiltrating the mainstream was a natural extension of my street art. I've always tried to communicate ideas to the public as directly as possible.

The trick is not to look back, but keep on expressing where I'm at now. It's challenging to create something new, so it's crucial to dwell in the present moment.

Whether it's a street poster on a brick wall, a magazine cover on a newsstand, or animation on a movie screen - art is an effective means of communicating with large numbers of people.

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.

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