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.

Having your work in a museum is something we as artists aspire to, but I don't think that's something we need to worry about while we're alive.

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.

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.

Street posters allowed you to have the last word. If you put them up in your neighborhood, you were speaking to your neighbor.

When I was younger, when I was a teenager, the work was more satirical and funny and cartoony. And part of it was chops - if you have a more limited repertoire of stick figures and cartoon characters, they lend themselves more to humor than to tragedy.

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