When someone tells you it’s a grain of sand, there’s a moment where your reality falls apart and you have to reconstruct it. You have to step back and ask what the image is and what it means.

In the back of every painting there's an entire universe that makes it possible for the painting to be there: an army of conservators, technicians, people who maintain these things, the market.

Whenever I am tired of making photographs of drawings, I make drawings of photographs.

I'm not creating art that starts with politics or starts with ethics. I feel I am a conceptual artist because my art is more concerned with epistemology than ethics or politics or even aesthetics.

Every time you show something to somebody they're going in one direction, when they see that thing you did they're going to go off track - maybe towards a direction that you think is more important. They'll be more discerning, they'll probably see things a little bit more profoundly, they'll spend more time trying to understand what's in front of them.

My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.

I think that the development of any culture has something to do with the way people deal with the concept of illusion. The fact that the sound of my voice and the way I modulate it creates pictures in your head... in order for us to accumulate knowledge, we have to create symbolic exchanges that let ourselves be fooled temporarily by something that's not there - by a substitute for reality. When you talk about representation, you're talking about language.