I think art is the development of this interface between mind and matter, between mind and phenomenon, between what's inside of us and what's happening outside of us. It developed over the course of the last 35,000 years. We made a lot of improvements because it not only gave us the tools to understand the world better, but it also gave us better and better tools to do it. It's that continuous relationship: technology and discernment.

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.

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.

Illusions as bad as mine make people aware of the fallacies of visual information and the pleasure to be derived from such fallacies.

A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a little bit more intention, you see it.

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.

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.