We can't suddenly quit a job and then race to find a form of art that will pay off before the next mortgage payment is due. Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it … Art isn’t about the rush of victory that comes from being picked. Nor does it involve compliance. Art in the post-industrial age is a lifelong habit, a stepwise process that incrementally allows us to create more art.

If you become so frightened of realities that are not your own, if you take upon yourselves tragedies that do not exist in your reality, in your moment, then you weaken your position and weaken the position, of those you think you are helping. You look about you and you see only hopelessness and helplessness. You organize your reality according to the tragedies of the newspapers!

The miracle of your being cannot escape itself. Your thoughts blossom into events. Your beliefs grow as surely in time and space as flowers do.

You can spend your time on stage pleasing the heckler in the back, or you can devote it to the audience that came to hear you perform.

The next time you have a choice between chasing the charts (whichever charts you keep track of) and doing the work your customers crave, do the work instead.

Desire is action. In the inner world, your desires bring about their own fulfillment, effortlessly. That inner world, and the exterior one, intersect and interweave. They only appear separate. In the physical world, time may have to elapse, or whatever. Conditions may have to change, or whatever, but the desire will bring about the proper results. The feeling of effortlessness is what is important.

The linchpin is an individual who can walk into chaos and create order, someone who can invent, connect, create, and make things happen. Every worthwhile institution has indispensable people who make differences like these.