The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself.

But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.

It strikes me as somewhat odd that the people who use God's name most frequently, both in life and in literature, usually don't believe in him.

We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.

I would like to travel light on this journey of life, to get rid of the encumbrances I acquire each day. . . . The most difficult thing to let go is my self, that self which, coddled and cozened, becomes smaller as it becomes heavier. I don't understand how and why I come to be only as I lose myself, but I know from long experience that this is so.

Remember the root word of humble and human is the same: humus: earth. We are dust. We are created; it is God who made us and not we ourselves. But we were made to be co-creators with our maker.

I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.