If you're a baker, making bread, you're a baker. If you make the best bread in the world, you're not an artist, but if you bake the bread in the gallery, you're an artist. So the context makes the difference.

I'm not feminist, by the way. I am just an artist.

I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.

I am thrilled Lady Gaga has helped to teach her audience about long durational work and performance art.

Woody Allen has a wonderful line: 'Today I'm a star. What will I be tomorrow? A black hole?' That's very important to know - that you have the moment, then you lose the moment. You have to see your chances, you have to take them, and you also have to see when you don't have chances to take.

My mother and father were partisan national heroes: I learned sacrifice and discipline from them and that a private life is not as important as the message you want to leave.

I have always staged my fears as a way to transcend them.

I hate studios. A studio is a black hole. I never use a studio to work. It's very artificial to go to a studio to get new ideas. You have to get new ideas from life, not from the studio. Then you go to the studio to realize the idea.

Yes, I believe stories are very important to all performances. The life story of the performer shapes their work, and the life stories of the audience alter how they receive the work, what they read into the performer.

I am not a therapist. I am not a spiritual leader. These elements are in the art: it is therapeutic, spiritual, social and political - everything. It has many layers. But art has to have many layers. If it doesn't, then forget it.

Today, our attention is less than the television advertisement. We're looking at six or seven problems constantly. We're living in the disturbed societies of cities. I think modern technology is one of the worst things human beings have invented.

We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute.

When I taught art, I was always asked, 'How do you know you're an artist? What makes you an artist?' And to me, it's like breathing. You don't question if you breathe; you have to breathe. So if you wake up in the morning, and you have to realize an idea, and there's another idea, and another, maybe you are really an artist.

If you're a woman, it's almost impossible to establish a relationship. You're too much for everybody. It's too much. The woman always has to play this role of being fragile and dependent. And if you're not, they're fascinated by you, but only for a little while. And then they want to change you and crush you. And then they leave.

You can't choreograph death, but you can choreograph your funeral.

When I was 14, I thought I looked terrible. I wore these typical Slavic shoes with metal bottoms so you could always hear me coming and this really ugly princess skirt and blouse with the top button closed. I had a boy haircut, a baby face covered with pimples, and a really big nose.

The entire aim of my work is to elevate the human spirit. We can put the human spirit down so easily.

I believe that life is shorter; that is why we have to make experience longer.

People put so much effort into starting a relationship and so little effort into ending one.

Good art is never made in studio. Good art I make in life.

I am obsessive always, even as a child. On one side is this strict orthodox religion, on the other is communism, and I am this little girl pulled between the two. It makes me who I am. It turns me into the kind of person that Freud would have a field day with, for sure.

To really change the way society thinks, you have to give your entire being to it until there's nothing left.

The hardest thing to do is something that is close to nothing.

Being an artist is not easy - I have always said that to the students I have taught over the years. It's a huge sacrifice.