One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

You see, I thought of myself as making minimalist art like the music of Lamonte Young, or the paintings of Frank Stella.

Well, lo and behold, the greatest thing that ever happened in my life, a month later Alvin Cooperman called back and told my father that I had tremendous talent!

I'm there to make a kind of theatrical music that is desperately missing in my life. And if other people don't like it, I'm very unhappy, but I can't do anything about that.

Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.