I didn't know my grandparents. They were - my grandfather - my maternal grandfather died when I was five. I have very little memory of him. All my other grandparents were dead by the time I was of any age to remember anything.

There's a kind of poetic aspect to inert gas. And remember, first of all, they were completely unknown a hundred years earlier. We just didn't know about them. And then when they were discovered in the atmosphere, the idea that this is a material that would breathe in and exhale and becomes part of us for a while made it even more intriguing. The names, the Greek names, are interesting, too - if you translate neon, xenon and so forth are kind of interesting.

I was an adjunct. I never got tenure, never had it. I was a professor, though. But I never got tenure. I never really wanted tenure, to tell you the truth. Really wasn't - the guys who got - the tenured people were some of, like, the least interesting. And they were people I didn't really like very much anyway.

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

After I did the drawings of trees combining them with words, I started doing - I did that for a very short time. Then it kind of - that sort of evolved into just showing the branches of a tree coming down into the trunk and then going into the root system. So I showed both the branches and the roots of a tree, which were about equal. There is as much going on under the ground as is going on above the ground, which you can see.

I think I feel much more at home in studio.

A word refers to something in the real world and so, in a way, does a photo. It's not the thing itself, but it's a kind of suggestion of where you might look for that thing.