I think it was so unfair that people attacked Freida Pinto for being an Indian, playing a Palestinian.

I think the nice thing about showing work in New York is that other artists come to see it. When you show work in Switzerland or somewhere else, everywhere else seems to be the provinces in a certain way. You wonder what your paintings are doing on the walls and you wonder who's looking at them.

There were some types of sanctions that happen in the public world that made my work acceptable, where someone looks at the paintings and they don't - they may go, "okay," and then look at it in a different sort of way. Instead of just looking at it as some type of wild art, they look at it in a historical perspective or context.

I wanted to show painting paintings first, then the plate paintings; now I can show that I've sort of freed myself from stylistic inhibitions.

You can't have a good bullfight without a good bull.

When I'm making a movie, I don't like to know what's going to happen next. I like to watch something and be surprised all the time, and just not know, and let it take me wherever.

Nobody is perfect. I don't think it's the most scathing indictment of anybody. It's pretty innocuous. [Miral] is just the story of one family and one girl, living in that part of the world, and that's what goes on over there. I thought that maybe it would be informative and useful for people to know more about it.