You seem to make different concessions with yourself about what you want to focus on or not, and what you want to pay attention to.

I think it's your own ghost, seeing the work and just thinking if it will be okay to leave that around.

The thing about living in New York is that there are other artists; that is the most difficult, I think they are the hardest critics.

I have a completely romantic idea about making paintings, I guess.

I see paintings everywhere. I look at stuff and it looks like painting to me.

In a certain way, my work had set me up to be against lots of things. If there wasn't some sort of sanction for it in the public world, it might have been...it wouldn't have been tolerated, because people don't want things to get shaken up.

When I made my first film, Basquiat, I think one of the criticisms was that the way I work is episodic. Later, as people started to look at the movies, they started to realize that maybe that's my style. If I could do it better or another way, I guess I would.