I've been dealing with epic images, and I realized all of a sudden that I grew up in the age of epics.

It's weird making a drawing of painting. I start to realize that charcoal is this incredibly fragile material. I'm making images of paintings out of dust.

Art is a form of understanding like philosophy and science and mathematics are an understanding but the difference is that art has the capacity to hold all these different things. It is the form of understanding that is best suited for the contemporary time.

The great thing about doing a show in New York is that you can work until the night before.

If you're fortunate enough with your history, like with Men in the Cities, your work becomes so absorbed in culture that the authorship of it doesn't exist anymore.

My degree was in sculpture. I always think that drawing is a sculptural process. I always feel like I'm carving the image out rather than painting the image. I'm carving it out with erasers and tools like that. I've always had this fondness for sculpture.

The ebb and flow as an artist is a bizarre experience, for sure. I was lucky enough to become successful pretty young - in late '79, 1980 - with a body of work that got recognized and became an archetype.