Leslie Mann

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

We exist in this weirdly schizo culture, where sex is everywhere in the media, and yet, at the same time, you don't sit down and have a conversation about what you did in bed last night with your friends. Despite the ubiquity of sex, it's still a taboo when it comes to day-to-day conversation.