There is real beauty in my eyes when I lose my mind.
When a job is to be done there's no use putting it off.
The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.
The lives of people are like young trees in a forest. They are being choked by climbing vines. The vines are old thoughts and beliefs planted by dead men.
The life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose. There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form -- to make it true and real to the theme, not to life.
If I can write everything out plainly, perhaps I will myself understand better what has happened.
I watched tapes and became a historian of the sport, and tried to combine certain elements and find things in the gym and saw what worked for me.
When we suddenly awake to the realization that there is no barrier, and never has been, one realizes that one is all things mountains, rivers, grasses, trees, sun, moon, stars, universe are all oneself. There is no longer a division or barrier between myself and others, no longer any feeling of alienation or fear there is nothing apart from oneself and therefore nothing to fear. Realizing this results in true compassion. Other people and things are not seen as apart from oneself but, on the contrary, as one's own body.
What [man landing on the moon] is doing up there is indulging his obsession with the impossible. The impossible infuriates and tantalizes him. Show him an impossible job and he will reduce it to a possibility so trite that eventually it bores him.
Not all writers are artists. But all of us like the idea of somebody in the year 2283 blowing the dust off one of our books, thumbing through it and exclaiming, “Hey, listen to what this old guy had to say back in the twentieth century!