I think art, the discipline of creating, really does require tremendous solitude. But the whole creative process can seal your life to such an extent that while you're creating, you feel very self-sufficient. I've certainly experienced that.

If time were like a passage of music, you could keep going back to it until you got it right.

Legend adheres to artists whose deaths seem the corollaries of their works.

Jack Kerouac did what he most wanted to do. He wrote great prose. He became the writer he wanted to be.

If you want to do creative work, there are tremendous sacrifices involved, and tremendous financial sacrifices too. It requires dedication and solitude.

Jack Kerouac seems to have been preoccupied with the question of duality from a very young age. He seemed to feel that there was more than one person inside him. Indeed he would veer from friendly, open and so on to someone who was angry. In a way, there was a swing also between his American self and what he later called his Franco-American older brother. There was a swing between the deeply introverted part of himself and the person he became out in the world, having to act in an extroverted way.

A lot of artists don't survive, do they? You work very hard and finally you get what you want and it destroys you.