My real name

Jane Austen’s books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader. Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

I hate to make fun of anyone’s passions. The struggles from which they proceed are always real even when their manifestations are ridiculous.

Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.