Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.

I was probably the first kid in my high school to go to Yale. I applied almost as a lark. Then, when I got there, I was the dumbest person in your class.

Our lives are given meaning by our actions-accomplishments made while we are "here" that extend beyond our own time.

My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.

A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.

I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it.

I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.