“The simplest definition of awe is the coexistence of beauty and terror. And that is my everyday in San Francisco right now.”

"Once a work of art is matted, framed, and put on the wall, nobody knows what you paid for it. And if it was really high quality, museum quality, it should deserve to be in the collection."

"These are concerns for everyone. But they're really, really acute concerns for Black artists in San Francisco."

"I don't think it's the art by itself that changes the world — but there hasn't been any social movement of progress that I've known of that hasn't had art as a vital component of it."

"To make anything at all is radical. You have asserted something into a discussion that was not there before."

"It didn't make any sense to import artists to live in housing that people in the neighborhood would normally live in. If we could renovate those houses, they should be for the people who live there."

"Have feminists changed the way we think about violence? For sure. Have they changed violence? I don't think so. You keep doing it because you believe in it, not because you think it will."

"Unconscious and buried pain is like a coiled spring. Most of the time, all that stuff does is ruin your life — but every once in a while, directed the right way, it becomes great art."

"I make-believe as a career. I've been doing that since before I could walk. Me making believe is older than my teeth."

"He sprints across the room, snips the wire, sets off the alarm, grabs the painting Hitler loved, and the security guards are grasping at the van door as he zooms off."

"I never lost touch with reality, because I always kept it real. But you could fall in love with the lifestyle."

"I don't think erasure is good for the history — or herstory — of humanity. The question is: where do they go, and how are they contextualized?"

"If you have to be a barista, or if you have to carry the mail, you do that. Do not entangle the art market into what you need to get your work done."

"What the literary arts do is provide you with that vocabulary. So you can name the place where it hurts. You can name that itch — and now you know where to go and scratch."

"The most invisible type of censorship is actually the art market…You have to see the arts as a way to keep your humanity, not as a way to make a living."

"We have a government that's behaving in a very fragile way — when they put in measures to limit what people can learn in schools and what they can talk about in the workplace, that's coming from a deep fear of the truth."

“You can’t just hide under the table and hope this goes away…There’s an idea that we’ll be able to push back on the technology, and I don’t think that’s ever worked.”

“Traditional society is, for an artist, something like a battery — an accumulator of energy gathered over thousands of years of cultural change.”