If your vulnerability has become hardened, it's very, very difficult to be creative.

My spirit life is also the medium in which I live. It's not something that comes and goes. Without one the other wouldn't exist.

The people you have to lie to, own you. The things you have to lie about, own you.

Courage can't make you an artist, but without that courage, you won't remain one for long. First is the courage to be alone in the room where you create, and the courage to face that indefinitely, with no one to say if you are any good or not. Then, there is the courage to follow your work wherever it's going to take you. And the courage to fight for your work.

The value of having an inner map of the world as it is (not as it's broadcast) is this: it allows you to know that your task is larger than yourself. If you choose, just by virtue of being a decent person, you are entrusted with passing on something of value through a dark, crazy time-preserving your integrity, in your way, by your acts and your very breathing for those who will build again when this chaos exhausts itself.

To be physically astute and psychologically tended, yet morally insulated and conceptually blind--is to be crazy, not healthy.

If your vulnerability has become hardened, it's very, very difficult to be creative.