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

My spirit life very much depends on my work. My work very much depends on my spirit life. And I pray every day, as part of my own ritual, to a god I believe in, not a god somebody else believes in.

These things - the degree of vulnerability, the degree of skill, the degree of the longing to give - are influx all the time, And to lump all that under the word "creativity" assumes something much more static than it is. That's why an artist may be marvelous in her 20s, and be creating automatic crap in her 40s. A writer may be trivial in his 20s, and be writing incredibly in his 50s, because those things are always in flux.

An artist without obsession isn't worth a damn!

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.

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