A lot of things sound neutral, but they're not. A typical example would involve police violence. It's usually forbidden to call police "murderers," even if they're convicted of murder. People will say that it sounds hysterical and unobjective.

I feel like the traditional patron system meant that you would kiss the ass of one rich person and then hide all of the financial goings-on of your work, and you could pretend you were pure.

You can't use a drawing to prove a war crime. A drawing doesn't have that notion that it's proof of a reality. Because of that, you can do all sorts of interesting things in it.

I came in as an established artist. People were hiring me for what I did and for who I was. I think that has given me a vast amount of leeway; I feel so lucky that I came in that way.

The truth is, the vast majority of medical care for lower income people in America is shitty. If you go to a free clinic to receive any form of care, the majority of those will be overcrowded with nurses who are tired because they have to work with so many people. We are not a country that invests public money into taking care of poor people, so we usually rely on clinics with very overburdened and underpaid staff.

Rohini Mohan read. While she did, I sketched her. She writes with such beauty and violence, and it seemed like the best way to listen was to really watch her, in the way that only drawing someone lets me do.

Innocence is always the state of being untouched. Sometimes it's synonymous with virginity, so sometimes it's quite literal, but sometimes it's more of a mental state of being untouched, of not having seen a lot of the world.