You can take any one of our stories that we use right now, put western clothes on us, stick us out in the west and they'll work just as well - any single one of them - because they're stories about people, they're stories about things.
Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.
A lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn't have an ego when it's wanting to throw up. It just does it.
An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn't have normally been interested in it.
The work to me is everything, and I would throw every rule overboard and send them to the bottom of the sea tomorrow, if I felt there were a more excellent way.
If the poor overweight jogger only knew how far he had to run to work off the calories in a crust of bread he might find it better in terms of pound per mile to go to a massage parlor.
I guess if you're lucky enough not to have to pay your rent, then you or I take much more seriously the kind of work that I do, what it takes for me to leave two teenagers of my own and six stepchildren and a husband and four grandchildren.
