This is not a pleasant route for many young people to consider. You have to be either hopelessly passionate, or very stupid.

Failing, and learning from it, is necessary. Unil you've done it, you're missing an important piece of your creative arsenal.

Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box

By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember , it's how we interpret it - for ourselves and others.

I have a sort of tactility about music. I go into record stores and just run my fingers over it, the spines.

My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teaching.