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

The element of obsession is terribly important for an artist.

I require and enforce as non-interrupted a state of living as you can get in America right now without going off to live by yourself in the mountains.

If I had the money and the drinking capacity, I'd probably live at a roulette table and let my life go to hell.

Creativity is the vulnerability to spiritual and physical sensation, and to experience, combined with and acting upon a certain level of skill, combined with the compulsion or longing or need or desire to give.

That's what America's all about, man, if it's about anything. You can choose your own name.

I always thought Cyrano De Bergerac was a coward. He could fight a hundred swordsmen, but he was afraid of his nose, and he was afraid of Roxanne. Jam as cowardly as anybody about facing my fears. So, you spend your you years as an artist fighting those hundred people that you happen not to fear. Then you wake up one morning and realize all this time you're afraid of your nose. That's what you're going to have to face for the rest of your life. And you don't feel very courageous. But, if you don't face it, you dry up as an artist.