What helps me is watching other people negotiate loss. I think about how we dropped a bomb on people in Hiroshima and 150,000 people were killed in one night. Those people had to mourn and they had to rebuild their city right away.

With the death of Robert Mapplethorpe, I had lost my main collaborator in taking photographs. So I didn't know who to work with.

I'm pretty moral about what I do. If I didn't think I was worthy of doing something, I wouldn't do it. I ain't gonna waste a bunch of people's time.

When I'm on my own with my camera, taking these pictures, it feels as if I am in a room of my own, a self-contained world.

If I have any regrets, I could say that I'm sorry I wasn't a better writer or a better singer...When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep...An artist may have burdens the ordinary citizen doesn't know, but the ordinary citizen has burdens that many artists never even touch.

I've written a lot of prose. I just haven't published it.

Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting.