They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn’t – the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, “Why don’t you show the other stuff?” I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.

I knew I wasn’t that good a writer, and all I could remember was that I could draw. I’m better at drawing than I am at writing.

I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it’s all commerce.

I knew I had to take my ambition more seriously, so I enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then, in the fall, I went on a tour of my own. I didn’t go to New York because that was too well known for its art scene.

I just started to do my own thing for about a year and a half, and I worked in the evening selling phonograph records. Then I said to myself, “I’m afraid I have to go to New York after all.”

Of course, the ’60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the ’60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.

The sexual is part of everything, and it’s highly formalized. I hadn’t done figure for a long time. And I thought to myself, “Why not the erotic figure?”

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn’t make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I’d become a writer.

When you’re working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.

I always knew America was all about guns. You go to the movies as a kid, everybody’s got a gun.