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.

When the people clamor to be shielded from reality, when they praise their government for keeping things from them, when they choose to conduct their lives within the limits of whatever fantasy the government supplies, then they are no longer consenting to be governed, they are begging to be ruled.

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.

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.

The element of obsession is terribly important for an artist.

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

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.