Being an artist is a totally godlike thing to do - and I have a god complex.

You know the reason I love the stars is because we can't hurt them: we can't burn them, we can't melt them , we can't make them overflow, we can't flood them or burn them up—so we keep reacing for them

The audience creates its own personality, I've noticed, in the first five minutes. They will either be generous, funny, silly, withholding, academic, analytical, grudging. And I'm fascinated with how that gets constructed, because it happens right away.

Literature is the safe and traditional vehicle through which we learn about the world and pass on values from on generation to the next. Books save lives.

Art can be engaged in the world without being specifically politically engaged.

Why do you have to translate and decode things? Just let the image be. It will have a special kind of reality that it won't once it's decoded.

I'm an average enough person to point to the things I've gotten to see that are awe-inspiring.