You have visits, then you have disappearances. You enter, then you exit. You come, you go. It would be so great if you could just get to human enlightenment on a linear path.

Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture.

I think all my work's been about how do women get back into our bodies; how do men get back. We're all disassociated.

With the Gulf spill, I absolutely merged in the time when I had that infection. I couldn't get out of the Gulf spill. There were so many similarities: the drains and the siphoning and the tubes. And also in the way the earth was hurt, the ocean was bleeding. Remember the video cams of the oil gushing? I couldn't stop watching that.

What happened with cancer was that I just became a body. There was nothing else but body for a month. I was chemo'd and operated on and cut and poked. At first it was really horrifying and scary, and then it was just,Wow. You're in your body. This is body!

I think the human species is very suicidal.

I believe in irony. And if V-Day has taught me anything, it's that if you go out with artistic, outrageous irony and humor, people are drawn to it.