Anyone living, especially your peers, is a threat. You're judging them, they're judging you. This sort of criticism is as close to human nature as you can get. That can be a good thing sometimes. Jealously, rancor, competition, those can be good things in art. But it mostly puts you in a dangerous and disadvantageous position, and one that just takes away from you so much.

Forgiveness is the nature of my art in general. It's expressing love and compassion, the kinds of things that don't make sense in any other context other than emotive expression.

I was making my work as transparent as possible, without equivocations, without calling attention to itself, without apology. There's a lot of conventions in the art world that are not to be transgressed, but my economy of means doesn't abide by those strictures. There's no reason to abide by them. I don't have any vested interest in it.

There are lots of guns and action in my drawings, and part of that is just to make them more interesting. Because you can go through a whole film and it's mostly talking heads and little else until the action scenes, and they're usually violence or physical stuff. Same with baseball, or any sport. Except I find pitching and batting are visually very striking.

It's very rare that someone gets the death penalty for charges of conspiracy, for his influence, for his Svengali-Rasputin act.

Everybody has his own great ideas about what my art should be. But I can do whatever I like and there aren't many constraints to the way I work, whether I'm using a brush with ink or paint.

Art can be a kind of therapeutic, or kind of a fantasy life, or wish fulfillment...o r creating this alternate universe. Art gives me the freedom to do that.