Any work that is really great hovers between terrific and terrible.

The thing that a lot of people may or may not know is every artist is a cinephile, whether they watch movies whether they're painting, or have films that influence them.

...Let's get to the image as quickly as possible, let's get to the message even faster, and let's find the scale to knock you over the head with the image and the message.

I was aware that people thought a certain type of photo work was either stealing, borrowing, copying or dumb.

The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a doll face that we think of as only having one emotion. It's moving a light, moving my camera; it's just this mental investment that I make, and suddenly, everything changes.

When I first came to New York, in the '70s, artists were certainly divided about the Andy Warhol persona, and about the work. I thought it was utterly cool - I thought the Factory was utterly glamorous - but there were a lot of artists I really admired and respected who were older that kind of dismissed it, couldn't get it, and felt that there was a lack of seriousness about it.

I think I'm still, in many ways, a terribly self-conscious person. I'd probably be shooting and think, "Well, how does my hair look?"