At some time during the process, {of writing} I came up with a therapeutic device. After each draft I would tear up the pages and feed the paper to a worm compost I keep in my garage. A few months...

Not only should you be testing your project as you create it, you must most seriously test your creation as it begins to resemble a final product. So you know what you have - so you can improve it. So...

Stay humble; don't interfere; respect your creative genius

Can you draw a picture on the blackboard when somebody doesn't want you to? asked the rooster promptly. Yes, answered Kenny, if you write them a very nice poem. What is an only goat? A lonely goat,...

There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, that is the miracle of genius.

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and...

It was, in part, a longing – common enough among the inventors of heroes – to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that...

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as do the ordinary people, but to fulfill it in its...

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where...

There's so much to write. Where should I start?I texted my old Jiko this question, and she wrote me back this:'You should start where you are

His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he's somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he's making dream material visible.

. . . in every created thing, whether it is alive or whether is what we usually call inanimate, there is an attempt to communicate, even among the totally silent. There is a question being asked, a...

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry -- if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody...

Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made {the record}, but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it...