I don't quite understand how a generation and a half after the Second World War we've gotten where we are now.

We're all busy. It's a very fast-paced world. And art - and by that, I mean culture in a wider sense - is one of the few spaces where we're allowed to look and think without an immediate response or reaction.

I was really poor for most of my adult life.

I grew up in Harlem, but I moved to the Lower East Side when I was a teenager and it was ... I feel like when I try to describe it, it doesn't sound believable. It just sounds like you're lying. And I see it on the faces of my younger friends.

I never heard the term "art world" until I was in my thirties, and I was like, "What are you guys talking about?" It's the world, and we all live in the world!

The world feels overwhelming to me on every level. Just the number of organisms that live on this planet. Our politics, our violence, psychology, emotions; there's just a lot going on, right?

After the First World War, it was, like, let's form the League of Nations, we have to learn to work together. It's the only way we're going to survive. And now it's like we're undoing these very fragile institutions that were built after the First and Second World Wars that were about nations working on a kind of global diplomacy for our mutual benefit. And we're undoing them at such rapid-fire pace.