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

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.

There’s a moment of recognition. It’s that white-light kind of stuff that just “works.” I love that. And you know it when it happens, whether it’s a movie, music, a building, a book.

I think there are different ways of being rigorous, and I am asking people to be as rigorous in their pleasure as in their criticism.

I just say I’m an artist who works with pictures and words.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

I think there are lots of ways to make good work. You can throw big bucks at a project and make what some would call crap, or you can work very modestly with eloquently moving results.

I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary.

Teaching at university isn’t like teaching in an art school.

I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.

I like suggesting that ‘we are slaves to the objects around us,’ that ‘plenty should be enough,’ or that the ‘buyer should beware,’ within the context of conventional selling space.

Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.

I’m trying to engage issues of power and sexuality and money and life and death and power. Power is the most free-flowing element in society, maybe next to money, but in fact they both motor each other.

Art is as heavy as sorrow, as light as a breeze, as bright as an idea, as pretty as a picture, as funny as money, and as fugitive as fraud!

I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.

I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and what we become.

We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.

But alas, they are all sadly deficient, because they leave us under the domination of political and religious prejudices

Some critics have commented that understanding the specific Brazilian political context of the novel is helpful for reading Quiet Creature. This may be true, but it’s not prerequisite for understanding it.

Unless you count the political backdrop, which in any case is a familiar one to many international readers

I think it’s always dangerous to make political arguments in a religiously ideological way. And it’s very dangerous to treat as traitors to the American nation those who think differently.

The worst part of governing, the political side, is the grossest part, so that’s what they call it. So anything that reeks of that immediately gets tuned out by 70 percent of the population.

We lack a political culture, a culture of compromise. We in Poland, as well as the Hungarians, have never learned this sort of thing.

There’s such an aggressively a political movement in the US that anything that smells of being political – even the term “political” is so ridiculous, when you think about it.

The reality is that the British monarchy, for good or ill, is a modern political institution – perhaps the first modern political institution.