I hate to say I'm a photographer, because I learned photography as I went along. But I also hate to say I'm a painter, a draftsman, even an artist. I think it's good when you're confused about what you are; it means you haven't defined yourself as an artist yet.

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.

Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force.

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

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

I don't want to fool people. If I wanted to do that, I would be working with virtual reality. I want to operate on the other level, the other end of the illusion spectrum. I want to create the worst possible illusions so it doesn't really fool people, but instead give people a measure of their own belief. It makes them aware of how much they need to be fooled in order to understand the world around them.