Genius is nothing more than common faculties refined to a greater intensity. There are no astonishing ways of doing astonishing things. All astonishing things are done by ordinary materials.
If most American cities are about the consumption of culture, Los Angeles and New York are about the production of culture - not only national culture but global culture.
I'm an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.
I read in a weird way. It comes in waves, and then I start, like, five different books at once. It takes me six months to a year to finish them all, since I read mostly on planes.
Student journeys which were important to me were Sicily, Greece, and Egypt, where I really saw these buildings, and that is where you're able to grasp what things mean.
The latest page I've been working is about the organization of the pantheon of the gods. Who's indebted to whom, how they are related, who screwed whose uncle or grandmother, all of that.
I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.
I felt very strongly the whole social impact of that depression, you know, and I felt very strongly about the efforts that this Resettlement Administration was trying to accomplish; resettling people, helping them, and so on.
I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
You can always tell in a movie when they are setting you up for something. If someone leaves an important object on the table and walks away, the camera will have some way of indicating that to you.
She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself.
When I moved to New York, I was waiting tables, painting in the daytime and working at night, and I felt it was possible to find a balance and just about get by.
When you left on Saturday, I felt a horrible void, I saw you everywhere, on the beach, in your room, in the garden: impossible for me to get used to the idea that you had left.
I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.
I'm very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.
Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.
If the bottom dropped out of the market and the artist was not going to sell anything, he or she will keep working, and the dealer will keep trying to find some way to convince somebody to buy this stuff.
I always felt I was living in two worlds. One was the Mexican world, because nearly everybody I knew, relatives and cousins and kids in the neighbourhood, were Mexican. Then school was a different world. It was ethnically mixed.
We grew out of the superhero comics, but we still liked comics, so we started putting our own experiences in the stories we were doing for our own amusement.
We were very happy when a South African court, which had previously ruled against us, took another look and decided that this material was not obscene and allowed it into the country.
I wanted to do pretty much a purely boy story, yes. The girls are kind of the bad guys in 'Marble Season', although that wasn't my intention. It's also a world without adults.
