Just don't do things that depress you. I realized if it depresses me, then I just don't want to get close to it. If it brings me down, I just really can't get into it.

Your style is who you are when you’re not trying to be clever or better than you actually are.

It wasn't really until after I got out of art school that I realized that I'd been doing that sort of for the audience, for that context. Somehow, being alone in the room, it made no sense at all to make those kinds of paintings.

I think what I do is find a cliché and try to believe in it, try to get to where I don't laugh at it.

I suppose the good artists, the righteous artists, somehow manage to be exuberant, and the embarrassed artist has this idea that everybody has to stop being so excited, which I find so distasteful.

There is a fascination with violence and power in all modernism, and I sort of saw classic modernism as being more similar to Wyndham Lewis than to the Renaissance. It's not about flow and the presence of humanism and all those things.

A painting of any quality is always going to have nerdy energy, an affirmation behind it. It's gonna be like a kid playing a video game.