"Even though I consider myself a conceptual artist, I am a traditionalist when it comes to photography. I like to use film and shoot straight. No technical gimmicks or special effects. What you see is what I saw when I looked though the camera. If I've dazzled you with lights and colors, it's because I've dazzled you with lights and colors. Ideas are more important than effects. And effects are always better when they're real."
"I see myself as belonging to a tradition of religious art going back to Caravaggio and others. Caravaggio's works are so strong - using a prostitute as the Virgin Mary."
"I distrust anyone with a message. The best artistic intentions are usually cloaked in mysteries and contradictions. It wouldn't be interesting for me if the art were not 'loaded' in some way. I always say my work is open for interpretation and that's why I prefer not to read many of the 'interpretations' out there. Suffice it to say, the work is like a mirror, and it reveals itself in different ways, to different people."
"Freedom of religion and freedom of expression have something in common: they both have the power to polarize people. Everyone has an opinion on these freedoms and those opinions often clash. It's the result of living in a Democracy where the people don't always share the same values or opinions. That's why it's called a Democracy, because you are free to choose."
"Keep your dreams no matter what. When I hit my twenties I turned my back on being an artist and became a drug addict instead. I stayed a drug addict until my late twenties when my biological clock told me that if I stayed in that life in my thirties there'd be no turning back. There are all kinds of ways of being an artist and there is no right way or wrong way, only your way."
"When I make work, I don't usually feel like I'm trying to tap into anything in particular, because I see myself as more of a classical artist, with connections to the past. So I try to make work that is timeless, as you say, like torture, racism, homelessness, religion, these things are all timeless and they keep cropping up in my work. And so I'm fixated on things not in the moment but of the times."
"It's easy to torture people when you have power over them."
"Torture almost seems to be a part of the human condition."
"I don't see myself as a champion of a cause or an artist with an agenda. I'm not trying to save the world. I just see myself as the child in the story of the emperor's new clothes. The child is the only one who can say the emperor has no clothes. We're conditioned to not look at certain things. It's too much of an overload to look because we'll feel bad about everything, so we choose to ignore them. I come along and say, 'Hey, look at this.' I feel like what I do is state the obvious."
"I am a Christian. Sometimes I'm a misunderstood Christian, but I am a Christian. I'm also an artist. It's not like you can say, 'he's a good guy,' or 'he's a bad guy.' Maybe you're a bit of both. But I would say that my work does have a sense of humanity in it. I'm concerned with the same things that the pope is concerned about - opening a dialogue with Cuba, the problem of homelessness. It's my dream that Pope Francis would meet with me, and give me his blessing, and maybe give me a commission to do work for the church the way that religious artists have worked for the church in the past."
"There is a certain aesthetic that I have to live up to. I choose to make beautiful objects, even if they're about things that make you uncomfortable. If my work didn't have that urge, that duality, the contrast between the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, it would just be making pretty pictures. It would be decorative work, and nobody would want it from me."
"A lot of times, contemporary art right now is intellectual, and it's cold. It's not political; it's not social. It's art about nothing. My art is about something, and it's not cold, because I'm not a cold person. Quite frankly, I don't understand a lot of art, so it makes sense to me that maybe some people don't understand my work as well."
"When I did the Shit show, I wanted to take beautiful pictures of shit. They are very abstract but also conceptual in the sense that the language of shit is also present in the titles. There is Good Shit, Bad Shit, Holy Shit, Bullshit, etc. It was a conceptual play on words, because there was no difference between Good Shit and Bad Shit, because they were both bullshit, meaning they were the same shit from a bull but photographed from different angles against different backdrops. I was making a statement: everyone thinks their shit is the best shit. And I was saying, if you want some shit, I've got the best shit in town!"