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

Good is not the opposite of evil, joy is the opposite of evil.

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.

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.

Stop tolerating in your leaders what you would not tolerate in your friends.

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

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