I may have a lot of political opinions but it doesn't necessarily come into my work. I keep the two worlds separate.

I think you say the word in your mind anyway, you know. When you look at a word, you say it.

ne thing you have to develop as an artist is a confidence in what you're doing and that you're right about it.

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.

I have never had a shortage of ideas for shows. I always just do them and the gallerists don't - they stopped long ago trying to tell me what I should show in their gallery. They just don't even do it. I show whatever I want to show. They are very happy and as far as I know, they have always been very pleased with whatever I have shown, even if it is nothing to sell.

People ask me why I use words and the reason, of course, is that words talk to you. I mean, they're something that are generated inside of you and that you can relate to you.

But if I did read, say, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, for instance, it always seemed to me that the parts that I understood in what he was talking about - and I read him because - well, he wrote a book, well, the Phenomenology of Perception [New York: Humanities Press, 1962]. And it seemed to me that perception had a lot do with how we take in art.