The Indians are a marginal people in Guatemala just like I am a marginal person in the first world.

Fortunately I don't want to be part of the mainstream. When I see a Kiki Smith work, for example, she's very contemporary, and I feel a lot of emotion in each of her pieces; I think she understands our time, and she makes really interesting art because of that.

When you're somebody who has the pretension to make art, it's completely different from when someone else says I want to make a book of your art. You don't decide the title, you don't decide the size, the order of the photographs . . . so it's completely out of control!

I am an architect. I try to feel the transparency in contemporary buildings and I try to understand the transparency in Zen poetry. I just want to mix all those things.

If you can explain a poem, it is not a poem. Poetry has to be inexplicable.

To have a museum like the Museum of Modern Art in New York is to have power. I don't have any interest in being the director of an institution that has power.

Usually the Indian people are outsiders who have to look up at the people who look down.