My mother always called me an ugly weed so I never was aware of anything until I was older. Plain girls should have someone telling them they are beautiful. Sometimes this works miracles.

I always have one or two sometimes more Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead respect for burial sites.

I think that the U.S. does have this very much more open attitude and I admire it very much and I think it's very important to the world. But the information and the discussion sometimes come too late after the effective decision has been made.

I've always had a 'Work hard play hard' attitude to life - I still do - but sometimes you get involved in something that needs a calm methodical approach.

Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

Cinema is still a very young art form with extraordinary techniques and very impressive special effects but sometimes it seems the soul has been taken out of things.

I don't know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I've gawked at the gaudy prices and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: Sometimes placing one work of art near another makes one plus one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact transform both and create a third thing.

Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste momentary glitches in an artist's work or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times however these problems mean there's something wrong with the art.