I stopped painting because I was so shocked at what I was doing and how much I wasn't in the work. The work was alien to me. I didn't know how to paint in a way that would get me out of this funk.

I think one important thing that happens in the studio is accepting yourself as the enemy and painting from that point of view. So instead of pointing the finger outward and passing judgment, instead, you start with yourself as your own worst enemy.

I was looking at books and reading the indexes and finding a next book and reading that book, and then from that index ... It was a version of surfing the internet before the internet. I was surfing the New York Public Library. It was back when you had to fill out a form and put it in a chute.

I think it's important to make art that is not that easily absorbable, that is a challenge to the authorities.

You always feel very vulnerable when you put your work out there. You feel a kind of nakedness. And you expose something of the inner workings of the way you experience life.

I'm not trying to be a finger-wagger at society. I sort of start with myself.

A good film is always nourishing. It's not about it being hopeful or bleak it's about how it touches you, how it moves or stirs you.

I think it's really important as an artist not to be drawn to the haters, because there are so many people who are nice and quiet.

I think great art goes beyond the control of the artist. In some ways, art often makes itself and reveals things about that artist that maybe the artist is not fully conscious of.

I spent a lot of time at the New York Public Library, the main branch. I was one of those people. If you ever spend a good amount of time there, you realize there are people who spend the entire day there. They're bookish homeless people.

You have to be polite with your friends and your family, but in your art, it's important to not be polite.

It's easy to attack an artist as misogynist, but that's really such a facile epithet. And if an artist is constantly worrying about how others will judge a work, it can end up being a block to investigating certain areas of human nature or certain truths about sexuality.

I wanted to paint pictures of people. I thought, Why bother doing anything else. Everything else is a waste of time. I want to tell stories about people and their feelings and emotions.