I was always fascinated by diagramming a sentence. Because that is going into a space, going into a world of language.

I wish we could make buildings that could constantly explode and come back in different ways. The idea of a changing environment suggests that if your environment changes all the time, then maybe your ideas will change all the time.

Why was I in a basement saying, "I'm alone here," wielding a lead pipe and crowbars? It was like I was doing the Vietnam War. It was like I was being America. If I put a blindfold on, I can't see you as people, which seemed to be what the United States was doing. I mean, it was important for people in my generation, because I grew up in the '40s, at a time when America was supposedly the hero nation. America saved Europe. And, some years later, we realized, America is a criminal.

Maybe I can pull at my breast in a kind of futile attempt to develop a woman's breast. It's not that simple to become a woman. But I think what was important, when I think back on that work, is something like The Little Engine That Could. It's me saying, I think I can, I think I can. Though I'm doing something I obviously can't, it's the process toward it that is important. The will toward it, the effort . . . My work was about getting to a place that you couldn't get to.

Rather than attend to a world considered as if it's out there, I have to start to attend to me. That led to some things that I never wanted it to lead to, person as a sort of psychological miasma. I started to get wrapped up in self, and then, for the first time, self did become an autobiographical self.

Public space can be a lot better with some private space to contradict it and vice versa. It keeps the system alive. If the system is just one thing, then it's closed and it eventually dies.

I didn't want to admit that I was a performer. A performer meant spotlights - a performer had connotations of theater. I would have preferred agent to performer.