I just finished doing a large Holocaust piece, a seated figure over seven feet tall. It's gigantic. It's going to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I could have lived a hard life as an artist, but teaching had all those other factors. And it's so relatively easy.

Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.

I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.

I always felt that I had anxiety of survival in terms of livelihood even when I was making plenty of money.

I always felt I needed to teach to survive.

But I think doctors have always been either honest or dishonest.

But I did a hundred book covers at least, and record jackets, and things like that. I had income from that as well.

Almost everyone stops being an artist. Most artists don't become artists. But that's another discussion. What it takes to be an artist.