WAYNE WHITE

If they make the deadline because the Shiites and Kurds essentially rammed a draft through over Sunni Arab objections, there will be hell to pay.

The whole purpose of those attacks was to drive those contractors out. Lots of them had to leave. They were terrified.

Almost all Iraqis with any previous experience in the intelligence business are Sunni Arab, increasing the risk of penetration of the new intelligence apparatus by the insurgency.

But nobody predicted anything of this magnitude in terms of resistance. And in part, the magnitude of the resistance was spurred by our failures in reconstruction.

I don't like the idea of busing children all over the country. It's not safe. And there doesn't seem to be that much of an urgent need for it to be done.

But I think frustration is hilarious. One of my missions is to bring humor into fine art. It's sacred.

You're free because you don't have to expose yourself, and you can go wild, and let your id completely out of its box, and nobody will see you because you're operating through a surrogate. It's an opportunity to crack open your shell, to melt down yourself, and just let yourself go. It's a form of catharsis for me.

I hate the whole group of artists who are so hermetic and completely indecipherable on some level and they're all proud of themselves for it. It's like, how obnoxious, how pretentious. And that's part of my mission as an artist is to kick down those people or make fun of that type of high horse attitude.

I have some sort of performing gene that's just there and I cannot explain it but I want to connect with people through a camera or on a stage. I just can do it. I just have an intuitive sense of it. So I love doing that, I love going into that trance.

I wanted to deconstruct the puppet show. I wanted to turn it inside out and do stuff that you're not supposed to do. I didn't want it to be gentle like most puppet shows tend to be, since they come from childhood where you're gently trying to tell a story. I wanted to blast all that out of the water. I think there's plenty of room of any kind of attitude toward puppets. I call puppeteering acting while hiding.

When I commit to working with an artist, I give them as much respect as I would like and if I'm not going to commit that way, then I don't want to work with you.

Sheer obstinacy is very very important for anybody who wants to create.

I would advise puppeteering for any artist. It's a way to break down pretensions. It's a sculpture that can talk. It's a painting that can talk. And it's pure play. I think every artist needs to stay in touch with the idea of playing. The artist should always be playing, always. All art is performance.

The only tip I have for an artist is perseverance... Never give up.

I'm neurotic in the sense that I can have a crowd of 300 people cheering you, applauding you, standing O, but one guy come out of the audience and go, "Hey man, you should have cut 20 minutes. That wasn't so good." And I'll just obsess on that one guy. After all this love, I'll obsess on him and want to smash his face in and strangle him and kick him down the stairs and I'll be pouting about that one guy all night.

I had to learn to do stuff only for myself, and stop thinking about pleasing some imaginary client or boss. It's a habit that many artists get into that have worked in commercial ventures.

I'm a sign painter with no boss.

It's about communication, no matter how impossibly hard your art is to understand and how much of an ivory tower or high horse you get on, it's still basically communication or why are you doing it?

I'm a perfectionist I guess. Everyone has to love me.

Puppets allow a person to express things through this surrogate that wouldn't normally get expressed. You know there's famous techniques of puppet therapists. Put this hand puppet on and tell me what the problem is.

No matter how much I'm on and people are loving me, there's always some like, and it's usually a woman too, in the audience rolling her eyes, "Oh Wayne, you're embarrassing yourself." There's always someone like that.

People that are born beautiful like supermodels act like entitled a**holes. It makes you embarrassed just to see 'em. They handle beauty embarrassingly.

I throw dignity out the window, and just become a creature of the moment on the stage. I act like I'd never act in real life.

When I perform I'm very extroverted and I wear my heart on my sleeve and some people don't like that. They're embarrassed for me.

Being an artist is a lifestyle.