You have to be polite with your friends and your family, but in your art, it's important to not be polite.

I think one important thing that happens in the studio is accepting yourself as the enemy and painting from that point of view. So instead of pointing the finger outward and passing judgment, instead, you start with yourself as your own worst enemy.

I think it's important to make art that is not that easily absorbable, that is a challenge to the authorities.

I'm not trying to be a finger-wagger at society. I sort of start with myself.

You have to be polite with your friends and your family, but in your art, it's important to not be polite.

It's easy to attack an artist as misogynist, but that's really such a facile epithet. And if an artist is constantly worrying about how others will judge a work, it can end up being a block to investigating certain areas of human nature or certain truths about sexuality.

I was looking at books and reading the indexes and finding a next book and reading that book, and then from that index ... It was a version of surfing the internet before the internet. I was surfing the New York Public Library. It was back when you had to fill out a form and put it in a chute.