You can't have silence on the radio; people will turn away from the station.

I think words speak to us even though they may be written on a wall. So we hear them in our mind. We say it to ourselves. But they are also visual things. You draw them. They are designed. They are colored. They have a certain size. I put them in a certain place. So they are objects that have to be - artistic decisions have to be made in terms of the color and the size and the line and whatever.

I was also a good writer, by the way. My, you know, my English teacher and writing teacher loved my writing. You know, I wrote short stories and things like that. And they liked them very much.

Agnes Martin is a big influence in my work actually, when I first saw her, these fine grids.

But artistically, my art I kept very separate from my political beliefs, deliberately and very, very rarely would I allow that kind of thing into it.

Art was something that I was really interested in, probably more so than writing or anything else.

Even though you're reading something, it's as though that person who wrote it is speaking to you. It's a form of conversation, really.