“Since I was shot, everything is such a dream to me. Like I don’t know whether I’m alive or whether I died. I wasn’t afraid before. And having been dead once, I shouldn’t feel fear. But I am afraid. I don’t understand why.”

As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I’ve found that to be absolutely axiomatic.

I don’t want to be smart, because being smart makes you depressed.

My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat or in film’s case ‘run on’ manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing.

People’s fantasies are what give them problems. If you didn’t have fantasies you wouldn’t have problems because you’d just take whatever was there.

I think everybody should like everybody.

Exposure and attention make a work famous – the more you talk about it, the more attention it gets, the more validity it achieves.

I’m really afraid to feel happy because it never lasts

You’d be surprised how many people want to hang an electric chair on their living-room wall. Specially if the background color matches the drapes.

The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.

Fashion wasn’t what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going.

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

I just do art because I’m ugly and there’s nothing else for me to do.

Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they’ll just have to learn how to be babies longer.

Sometimes the little times you don’t think are anything while they’re happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life.

You have to do stuff that average people don’t understand because those are the only good things.

Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

I want to make people feel intensely alive. I’d rather have them against me than indifferent.

Isn’t it wonderful to be alive? You know, you can forget all about it. Then suddenly you remember, and think of all the things you can do. Here I am. I can walk around. I can talk. I can see things and remember things. I am alive. How wonderful!

I stay cool, and dig all jive, That’s the way I stay alive. My motto, as I live and learn, is Dig and be dug In return.

We always live for the summer until we don’t live it at all.

We have a planetary emergency. We have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission.

It’s that engagement of learning that makes us feel alive.