Art comes from life, not from the studio

In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible.

Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.

You create a friendship on a level that you've never done before. The basic kind of experience is to basically give love to total strangers all the time, and that really changed everything in me. And this piece transformed me more than any other one before. I saw my entire life differently. What do I have to do? What is my passion on this planet? I'm much more focused than I ever was before.

My grandmother, when she looked at American movies, she said, 'They're all the same. In the first scene somebody shoots somebody and then everybody makes phone calls.'

People ask why there are so few female artists who succeed. It's because women are not ready to sacrifice as much as men. Women want a man, they want a family, they want to have children, they want to be loved, and to be an artist. And they can't; it's impossible.

One thing I learned from his holiness the Dali Lama is the importance of humor.