Because it's difficult to have a career as an artist, and in every situation where it's difficult to have a career, it's even harder for women, for all the other reasons that it's harder in other fiercely contested fields.

For women who have children, the economic difficulty of sustaining a life as an artist maybe makes it impossible. There's no maternity leave, there's no pension.

Anyone could be in the orchestra, or sports team, or arts club at my school. It was precisely the kind of inclusivity that now meets with a sort of scorn and derision as a prizes-for-all culture that generates only mediocrity. There's something so insulting about the idea that including lots of people means mediocrity.

I work intentionally to try and make dense, complex things. We can move between genres and forms, from something that looks like a PowerPoint lecture to something that looks like an informercial to something that looks like a cinematic melodrama.

My advice is never let a publicist call you a 'visionary.' I've hung out with the visionaries at the famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. I've been a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. I wouldn't touch 'visionary' with a 10-foot pole.

If I ever stop being grateful for gigs, I just need to stop. Because this business is... you know, it's just so kind of job-to-job, and the fact that I've continued working... I'm just incredibly thankful for it. And I never, ever take it for granted.

I wanted to be an architect, and I ended up at my job in San Francisco, and if you would have asked me then, that was one of the greatest jobs that had happened to me in terms of my career.

My undergraduate years at the University of Nebraska were a special time in my life: the combination of partying and intellectual awakening that is what the undergraduate years are supposed to be. I went to the university with the goal of becoming an engineer; I had no concept that one could pursue science as a career.