I never get my creativity flowing. I'm a pro, this is how I earn my living. If it don't flow, I don't eat.

We have to be realistic about the brutal demands a money culture puts on the psyche, and there is a great cost to this in terms of creativity. Look at the state of people at 65. How many of them become creative after having to survive in the money culture?

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

I never get my creativity flowing. I'm a pro, this is how I earn my living. If it don't flow, I don't eat.

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

I try to write into the heart of experience. Then, through the experience of the writing, that heart reveals itself to me. To write it down for others, as a door to go through it they choose, is the price of the experience, the price of the ticket. This is the demand that God, if you like, puts on you for being an artist.

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