Decay is quiet but ghastly, explosion is dramatic and dreadful. There's not much to choose between the two of them in reality, and most of our lives have sufficient of both.

We flashed our feathers when the feathers were fit to be flashed, and now, in drearier days, many stay indoors.

We have to recognize that it is a very, very painful thing for people to be exposed to their social community, to be exposed in the world, as not what they would have wanted to be seen as. This is very painful and difficult for people.

Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people.

People always think their world is coming to an end if they're exposed, and of course it isn't coming to an end; it goes right on exactly the way it always was.

You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note.

Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It's much better if one simply does.