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Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

I see so many activists... who are artists because they feel that they have the power of communication.

I'm an artist, I'm not an activist.

Writers of literature make very little money.

Writers are not meant for action.

Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people.

So many artists try to be something that they're not.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

There's almost no author alive who isn't weathering the tumultuous changes in the publishing industry.

Artists speak the truth to the public without fear of retribution or damage to their careers.