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.

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?

All paths cause pain, so to chose the safe over the audacious will not give you less pain, only less beauty.

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.

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

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.