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

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.

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.

Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.

In terms of language, English is very dominant vis-Ã-vis African language. That in itself is a power relationship – between languages and communities – because the English language is a determinant of the ladder to achievement.

Such indeed is the respect paid to science, that the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recals [sic] some well-known scientific phrase.

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation.

We can appreciate each other’s languages. And the question of being uncomfortable about our languages would go away.

You get another person who operates only in an African language and there are many persons who operate only in African languages; he or she is excluded from all the goodies that come with English.

Well, visual language is another boring discussion about the nature of film.

The language of young men is pull down and destroy; but an old man speaks of conciliation.