“If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you’ve got to realize that influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.”

I start a picture and I finish it.

I had some money, I made the best paintings ever.

If I’m away from painting for a week, I get bored.

I try to think about life.

I’d never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.

I wanted to build up a name for myself.

I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.

Believe it or not, I can actually draw.

There are about 30 words around you all the time, like ‘thread’ or ‘exit.’

The country makes me more paranoid, you know? I think the crazy people out there are little crazier.

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.

Most Young Kings Get Their Heads Cut Off.

Fire will attract more attention than any other cry for help.

I start a picture and I finish it. I don’t think about art while I work.

I don’t think about art when I’m working. I think about life.

The bringing to light of factual material and the development of ideas is to a large extent cumulative. But when artists themselves were, from about 1910, beginning to tear down the bastions protecting Art in its ivory tower,

In America, you have this kind of individualism and in the West, essentially, you have this individualism – this idea of my own personal fulfillment.

I can’t think of anything worse than trying to schmooze someone with the idea that you’re an actor.

I think Islam has been hijacked by the idea that all Muslims are terrorists; that Islam is about hate, about war, about jihad

The idea that I had anything to do with speaking about Islam or about the Muslim world was just absurd to my family. … I hadn’t been to the mosque in like 10 years.

If I get an idea for a series that I really like, I’m sure I won’t be able to resist coming back and doing it.

Questioning the idea of Art with a capital ‘A’, photography was inevitably to assume a new stature both in the eyes of artists and the public, too.

From my parent’s generation the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love. It was a partnership. It’s about creating family. It’s about creating offspring.