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

People are judged continuously everywhere on the most intimate level by the prices on their head. Most of them accept the judgment. It's very hard to have self-respect, or to maintain a state of creativity under these conditions.

The world of psychology and the world of normal life tends to look down on obsession. It's not good for you, and certainly not good for your relationships. It's not good for a lot of things, but it's the only way to make a work of art.

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

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.

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.

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