"I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex."

"I guess I get bored easily, and thank God. I don't want to all my life pound only the same key, although some artists do it very effectively. I'm not trying to denigrate anybody."

"When I went to art school, I was just having fun. I realised that was the last chance I had, and then I would have to get a job."

"It's human desire to be understood. And we always feel we're not understood."

"Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words."

"Food can be expressive and therefore food can be art."

"I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went."

"I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters."