It's not about fooling somebody, it's actually giving somebody a measure of their own belief: how much you want to be fooled. That's why we pay to go to magic shows and things like that.

I think I'm an ambitious artist but you have to understand the measure of your influence on people. You're not going to change people's lives with your art. What you do is you give them a little pat so that you change the course of the direction that they're going.

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.

We need saints; we need this head - this talking head - to communicate. Every single religion you have people that go in-between, that can talk to god or communicate ideas. Then there are the talking heads in the news every time we watch TV. No matter how complex, you still need a person there to tell you what happened: a storyteller of sorts. I find that fascinating that we feel so attached to this primitive mode of connection, this primitive interface to the world.

If you find an idea without form, please let me know because I would love to take a picture of it.

I think there's a gradient that goes from science to art and magic is the middle ground. I think that we're all trying to understand and define the world around us but often it's experimental.