We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will to have creativity, but we can will to give ourselves to the creative experience with intensity of dedication and commitment.

Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.

All our feelings, like the artist's paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

We must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic.

Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.

Now, I believe in life, and I believe in the joy of human existence, but these things cannot be experienced except as we also face the despair, also face the anxiety that every human being has to face if he lives with any creativity at all.

By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.