If you are resentful, you keep the thing alive. So the way to go on is to get rid of it, in order to forgive in order to forget.

You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.

Even though what I do does enter the market, it doesn't interest me. I am exclusively concerned with the formal qualities of my work. It is about the need and the right to self-expression.

Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.

I have been to hell and back, and let me tell you, it was wonderful.

It is a great privilege to be able to work with, and I suppose work off, my feelings through sculpture.

In my sculpture, it's not an image I am seeking, it's not an idea. My goal is to re-live a past emotion. My art is an exorcism, and beauty is something I never talk about.

Look at it this way -- a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional.

I know that when I finish a drawing, my anxiety level decreases. The realistic drawings are a way of pinning down an idea. I don't want to loose it. With the abstract drawings, when I'm feeling loose, I can slip into the unconscious.

I was a 'runaway girl' from France who married an American and moved to New York City. I'm not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup.

It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.

If you flatter me, or if you look at me the right way, I will kill myself to please you. It's very painful to be an overachiever.

I am a lonely runner, but I am a long-distance runner.

Don't be fooled by success and money. Don't let anything come between you and your work.

My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.

What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself.

I like Francis Bacon best, because Francis Bacon has terrific problems, and he knows that he is not going to solve them, but he knows also that he can escape from day to day and stay alive, and he does that because his work gives him a kick.

I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole.

I am a searcher...

I always was... and I still am...

searching for the missing piece.

The feminists took me as a role model, as a mother. It bothers me. I am not interested in being a mother. I am still a girl trying to understand myself.