A number of artists have done things with Mickey Mouse - including Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. He's such an American symbol, and such an anti-art symbol.

I dont have big anxieties. I wish I did. Id be much more interesting.

My work sanitizes it (emotion) but it is also symbolic of commercial art sanitizing human feelings. I think it can be read that way.... People mistake the character of line for the character of art. But it's really the position of line that's important, or the position of anything, any contrast, not the character of it.

What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward - neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

I'd always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn't.

There must be something about art... almost all cultures have done art. It's a refining of the senses, which are there to keep us alive. As far as we know, no other animals do that.