JENNY HOLZER

I wanted to be an abstract painter, but I was rotten at it.

I seldom have my stuff up unless I'm testing it. If I'm worrying about a painting, I put it up and see if I detest it quickly or slowly. Otherwise I have things by other artists.

Protect me from what I want.

I think of a piece, and then people who are competent fabricate it. But lately I've started finger painting, which probably should be a joke but isn't!

Company makes my day.

I am not free because I can be exploded anytime.

I used language because I wanted to offer content that people - not necessarily art people - could understand.

I really like doing the laundry, because I succeed at it. But I loathe putting it away. It is already clean.

I suspect you've noticed that making art can be lonely.

The epiphany for me was that I wasn't a writer, and I had to do something with these texts. I put them in the streets as posters.

On the worst days, I don't feel like an artist.

It can be kind of gruesome at times, making things alone.

When my daughter was young, she thought all electronic signs were mine.

I'm always trying to bring unusual content to a different audience - a non-art-world audience.

One of the glories and terrors of working in public is that you do see if your output means anything to anyone.

Well, I think in trying to make life seem real enough that one is moved to do something about the more atrocious things. By going really far afield into a completely fake world, maybe there's a chance to make things resonant somehow - or in this case, truly terrifying. To make it as bad as the real stuff that's happening.

I moved to New York in the 1970s and started writing when I was at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not. Then I swill tea around 8 a.m. I answer e-mail, while I stall thinking about whatever scares me.

The desperate things seem to require attention, the lovely things seem to elicit celebration. If I had to choose, I would go to the awful in the hope that doing something could yield a happier result.

Expiring for love is beautiful but stupid.

So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.

One thing that changed when I moved upstate was that I became interested in different materials. I started making the stone benches because I was seeing rocks.

Lack of charisma can be fatal.

I began to see that the short texts I was writing were poster material.

The most profound things are inexpressible.