I'm a disciple of Raymond Chandler, who said in his essays that there's a quality of redemption in anything that can be called art.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better.
I believe that art has been a vehicle for me that's been about enlightenment and expanding my own parameters, to give me courage to exercise the freedom that I have in life.
I like to think I'm writing in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, although I don't ape his style.
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
I view art as an inspirational tool.
You have to be a little contrite to get redemption.
Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.
When I got saved, God became my art agent.
It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.
I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.