I remember Bob Dylan saying in an interview that at a certain point he'd had to learn to do consciously what he'd previously done unconsciously or automatically. That resonates.

I'm not a visionary, but I've spent half my life drawing things Imagined, Remembered, and Observed, comparing the differences between them, and my study confirms that "the difference between night and day / is not as great as people say."

Some songs seem to achieve the quality of a geometric object - a ball, box, or cone - and I don't mess with 'em.

Songs came first. I started out in 1965 trying to copy the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Stones, like most kids I knew. I'm still trying. Songs are hard to beat.

My ignorance would require a volume to itself. Between its covers would be preserved a record of the spurious model of all creation I had in my head, a prelapsarian construct, uncorrupted by the facts.

I'd done a drawing of the model using only peripheral vision, looking at a spot on the wall to the right of where she sat. It wasn't really a drawing of her I produced; it was a drawing of the cloud of lights and darks she dissolved into when I focused on the spot. You could look at my drawing of this cloud and read it as a nude female figure, though a little translation was required.

I remember Bob Dylan saying in an interview that at a certain point he'd had to learn to do consciously what he'd previously done unconsciously or automatically. That resonates.