“Today, basically, on Wall Street, the big money is made by taking risks.”

Live your Art. Don’t think about it.

Vision connects you. But it also separates you. In my work, and my life, I feel a desire to merge. Not in terms of losing my own identity… but theres a feeling that life is interconnected, that theres life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.

There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.

A doctor once told me that with crying you aren’t sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don’t cry: you scream, you try to run. When it’s over and you’re OK, that’s when you cry.

People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

Everything we could call the contextualizing information. Representing that information is going to be the main issue in the years ahead – how the world meets the mind, not the eye.

It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That’s a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge.

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.

When I make my work, I am making what I hope to be something functional – a space for individual contemplation and reflection. I want my art to be useful.

I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.

In the mid- to late ’60s to the mid-’70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.

I don’t believe in originality in art. I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We’re always borrowing.

The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.

So one of the most unique things on screen in American movies today is everyday behavior.

I am but a generation removed from poverty and despair. Where would I be today if there had never been an America?

The only people benefiting from the status quo in immigration [in the USA] today are the people trafficking human beings across the border, and the people who are hiring illegal labor for cheap purposes.

I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists, that somehow there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate.

This is the only country in the world where today’s employee, is tomorrow’s employer.

Today you have millions of Americans that feel left out and out of place in their own country, struggling to live paycheck to paycheck, called bigots because they hold on to traditional values.

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.

If you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.