“The decadent artist markets other people's pain”

“The market follows the artist. The artist does not follow the market.”

“The vast size of the available workforce in the emerging markets (1.3 billion people in China alone) means that labor costs will not rise above the $2 per hour threshold for decades. And, that is what we are competing against!”

“An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.”

“An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.”

“It can be really painful to have to face how fucked up shit is and how scared people are…of being alive. Scared of things that are amazing. Scared of things that aren’t like television or aren’t dead. A lot of people can’t deal with three-dimensional human beings, they only know how to deal with other products — they see themselves as other products. When the world only treats you like a dot on a marketing scheme, you can learn to treat yourself and other people like that.”