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

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.

The different aspects of my activity, whether it’s writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don’t make any separation in terms of those practices.

Look, we’re all saddled with things that make us better or worse. This world is a crazy place, and I’ve chosen to make my work about that insanity.

Photography has saturated us as spectators from its inception amidst a mingling of laboratorial pursuits and magic acts to its current status as propagator of convention, cultural commodity, and global hobby.

What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing – the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up.

I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it’s the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.

Warhol’s images made sense to me, although I knew nothing at the time of his background in commercial art. To be honest, I didn’t think about him a hell of a lot.

I’ve always thought that it’s good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that’s how consensus is constructed.

Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not.

You make history when you do business.

It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean.

Direct address has been a consistent tactic in my work, regardless of the medium that I’m working in.

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.