If we operate with a belief in long sweeps of time, we build cathedrals; if we operate from fiscal quarter to fiscal quarter, we build ugly shopping malls.

Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply, you break through into deeper layers of the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.

Every conversation is a form of Jazz. The activity of instantaneous creation is as ordinary to us as breathing.

To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.

The Western Idea of practice is to acquire a skill. It is very much related to your work ethic, which enjoins us to endure struggle or boredom now in return for future rewards. The Eastern idea of practice, on the other hand, is to create the person, or rather to actualize or reveal the complete person who is already there.... Not only is practice necessary to art, it is art.

Creative living, or the life of a creator, seems like a leap into the unknown only because "normal life" is rigid and traumatized.

There is not ultimate breakthrough; what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul.