“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.”

Live your Art. Don’t think about it.

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.

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

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.

Most people who work with me can tell you I’m a bit of a pessimist about business stuff. Not because I don’t believe in what I’m doing, I just don’t like feeling presumptuous. Like, ‘This is what’s going to happen!’ Honestly, I don’t know what will happen.

Our band is very polarizing. There are people who absolutely can’t stand us, and people who absolutely can’t live without us. I’d rather spark those kind of polar-opposite feelings than have people be indifferent.

There are some directors, lesser in confidence or skill, who make the actor feel very uncomfortable because you feel you’re auditioning for them, every day, and that’s a terrible feeling on the set.

I really feel there’s no limitation on what this band can do in the studio or on the stage. That’s an empowering feeling – that we can bring a song to life.

It’s a very frustrated feeling you get when the only people with good photos of you work are the police department.

Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture’s prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.

Eventually you stop paying attention to your own feelings when there’s nothing to be done about them.

It’s very much to do with how I’m feeling … I love to be experimental and use eclectic mismatched things and put them together to see what third entity is created!