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

If you don't have your unconscious working for you, you're really out of luck as an artist.

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

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 think it's really important as an artist not to be drawn to the haters, because there are so many people who are nice and quiet.

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.

There was an expression of intensity in dance that was so compelling to me that I wanted a piece of that action.