“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?”

Doubt tempers belief with sanity.

I think what I’m trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience.

You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.

As with the Princess Di crash, which sent the media on the most insane feeding frenzy. From the moment of the crash, the pornography of sentiment never let up.

All violence is the illustration of a pathetic stereotype.

Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie.

Things change and work changes. Right now I like the idea of enveloping a space and getting messages across that connect to the world in ways that seem familiar but are different.

I’m trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.

I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.

It’s a small world, but not if you have to clean it

Love is something you fall into.

I’d always been a news junkie, always read lots of newspapers and watched the Sunday morning news shows on TV and felt strongly about issues of power, control, sexuality and race.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It’s scary.

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 think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author’s rendition of events and circumstances.

It’s really hard for me to use the term ‘history’ in the singular, because it suggests a reductivist view of how moments and events congeal and reflect the passage of time. I’d rather stick to the pluralness of ‘histories’ in order to suggest the simultaneity, the parallel forces at work, which produce lived experience.

I like acting because I get to find different parts of myself, or at least create different parts that don’t already exist, and see the world through someone else’s eyes.

I came back to Ann Harbor, got caught up with people who were much more sophisticated than I, and it was an exciting time because my eyes were opening and that’s always exciting and Michigan is the place where we had the first teach-in against the war.

Many of my cartoons are not a belly laugh. I go for nostalgia, the lump in the throat, the tear in the eye, the tug in the heart.

My job [is] to awaken possibility in other people. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it. If they’re not shining you get to ask this question: “Who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining?”

My opinion is that prostitution always existed and will always exist. So I think it’s worth trying to give these women the best working conditions.

FBI Girl is touching and funny, inspiring and tragic, enlightening and sad. I closed the book with tears in my eyes and admiration in my heart for the girl Maura Conlon was and the writer she became.

That cactus went right through my eye. It left my eye flat. They took me to a doctor, and he said, ‘We’ll have to take the eye out.’ …I fought like a tiger. I said, ‘No! Leave the eye alone.

This is my philosophy: I prefer to stay out of the public eye. I love freedom.