Look at all the stuff the Existentialists did. You can start with [Pablo] Picasso, you know, and then Francis Bacon and other guys like that. What they were doing is depicting suffering. And that's exactly what a demon is, he's pretending that he isn't. So he can get more people down there. You know, misery loves company, that's the whole thing. So that's basically the pitch that I'm working on.

I always had a sense of liking diagrams, from the time I was studying architecture. Architecture is built diagrams, basically.

[H.P.Lovecraft] is thrust into some kind of outer space realm, like here [pointing toward the painting in progress]. In other words, he's recognized he's gone through R'lyeh, the Sunken City of R'lyeh, and then Cthulhu, the extraterrestrial, calls his band of worshippers home to recognize him as the anti-christ. This is all in The Necronomicon, something Lovecraft actually did make up.

I'd had the experience with Giuseppe Conti, I said, "My God, that's my movie!" I kept seeing [The Day the Earth Stood Still] everywhere I could. Then finally, when VHS and DVDs came out, I got that. And I keep watching it all the time.

I hear some guy teaches a course in diagrammatic thinking now; he's written books on it and stuff like that, and so it was kind of natural for me. Because it was a way in which words naturally fitted into something that's visual. I was always interested in doing that.

Forms of energy from nature gave my father trouble. He refused to believe he was going to die. He had these weird delusions. It's amazing. Along with all the great thoughts, he had all this funny stuff.

[Buckminster Fuller] was quite willing to talk. He'd talk at the drop of a hat.I learned to talk in front of people by listening to the way he did things. Because he would give lessons in how to lecture. He would say, "Never take a note, just stand up and start babbling. And then eventually you're going to be able to make some coherent statements, and so it's like you're vamping. And then people will gradually start to listen to you when this spot of logic shows up in this torrent of verbiage.