Glenn Ligon

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

I don't cook, and I don't care to, but Gabrielle Hamilton made me realize that food is about love and connection. And she has had a hell of an interesting life.

There is an imagined thing called black culture. But culture is a construction. It is learned behavior, not innate. The black American experience is the American experience.

Rather than say art is art and life is life, I like to say that they're joined and inextricable.

My mother used to say that when I told her that I wanted to be an artist, her famous line was, 'The only artists I've ever heard of are dead.' It just wasn't in her experience... I don't think she had a sense that one could be an artist, because there wasn't anyone in my family who had done that.

Sol LeWitt had a huge influence on my work because of his use of repetition and his clarity, setting up a system and letting that system go. That's kind of where the text paintings came from.

Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.

I make art to figure out what I'm thinking, not to tell people what I think.

Doors have an immediate familiarity. They're everywhere. They're scaled to our bodies, so there's something human about them.

I have been interested in neon for a long time. The first neon I made was in 2006, using the word 'America.'

In high school, driver's ed was at the same time as drama class. And I had to take drama class. Now I can sing the lead in 'Oklahoma!,' but I can't drive.

There was a time when I was a huge TV addict. I used to race home from school to watch 'Dark Shadows.'