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.

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.

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

My spirit life is also the medium in which I live. It's not something that comes and goes. Without one the other wouldn't exist.

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

I never get my creativity flowing. I'm a pro, this is how I earn my living. If it don't flow, I don't eat.