“I think I developed language skills to deal with threat. It’s the girl thing to do-you know, instead of pulling out a gun.”

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 think pictures and words have the power to make us rich or poor.

If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they’re my terms, and they’re not.

I worked with someone else’s photos; I cropped them in whatever way I wanted and put words on top of them. I knew how to do it with my eyes closed. Why couldn’t that be my art?

It’s hard for me to understand how working-class people support themselves.

Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It’s because I understand short attention spans.

You want it, you buy it, you forget it.

The reason why bookstores are going out of business in the States is that people just can’t focus on longer narratives now – even narrative film is in crisis in many ways, unless it’s an adventure film.

Prominence is cool, but when the delusion kicks in it can be a drag. Especially if you choose to surround yourself with friends and not acolytes.

I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty.

What I’m trying to do is create moments of recognition.

The so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me.

Money talks. It makes art. It determines what food we eat, whether we are cured or die, and what shoes we wear.

Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.

I don’t necessarily think that installation is the only way to go. It’s just a label for certain kinds of arrangements.

It’s good to keep in mind that prominence is always a mix of hard work, eloquence in your practice, good timing and fortuitous social relations. Everything can’t be personalized.

This is the precise difference between dancing and acrobatics. The dancer tries to express something; the acrobat merely pulls, raises, stretches and grinds.

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.

They can manipulate a lot of different things. They can pull strings, they know people.

Honor is the most capricious in her rewards. She feeds us with air, and often pulls down our house, to build our monument.

Pain pushes until vision pulls.

The production pushes and pulls you as much as the song does. It’s almost more to do with the production value of how each bit was done as opposed to the actual track itself.

On these days I go to my studio, leaf through an art history book, and tell myself that I am part of this great tradition.

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.