Be careful how you choose your enemy, for you will come to resemble him. The moment you adapt your enemy's methods your enemy has won. The rest is suffering and historical opera.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

An artist doesn't depend upon inspiration or have to have it. An artist doesn't depend on mood, certainly not if you're earning your living with it. One of the definitions of a professional is you can do some writing if you have to, even in the most extreme situations.