I think Northern California is the most beautiful place on earth. And I adore New Orleans, but there's something about the air in SF, for instance. It changes from moment to moment, like one's thoughts.

For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don't like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they're babies.

I think Northern California is the most beautiful place on earth. And I adore New Orleans, but there's something about the air in SF, for instance. It changes from moment to moment, like one's thoughts.

I think you're not really teaching anyone unless you're learning yourself.

I used to always love taking photos, but I would always give a camera away to someone else. Now I don't give the camera away anymore. It also takes a long time to develop a visual style, and I think that the things that I was imitating were people I love, like Judy Linn or Gerald Turner, and then it slowly started to become more myself.

I'm very interested in the question of how we perceive something, how consciousness goes from one thing, like looking at you in your black hat to what it might mean to my imagination and how I would draw that or write that, how I would subjectify you? It's something that is endlessly interesting to me.

Every time I put a collection together I'd scrap it because there was no "meaning," until I wrote about the two black men - friends - in the beginning of the book. So much of their experience was ABOUT trying to find friends in the authors/artists I wrote about - subjects that were/are a source of comfort, somehow, since none of them "fit," either