We Read To Find Life, In All

There Questions Of Wanting To Be An Artist, And What Does That Mean, What Makes You An Artist? Are You An Artist If You're In A Gallery In New York And Not An Artist If You're Doing It At Home? Do You Need Legitimation To Count? If You've Been Acculturated To Believe That You Have Certain Obligations - Familial, Social, Human - If Multitasking Has Been Your Forte And That's What's Been Praised And Rewarded, Where Do You Find The Single-mindedness, The Selfishness To Do Something Like Art? I Think Those Are Questions That Arise Differently For Women And For Men.

As My Wise Friend Didi Has More Than Once Observed About Life's Passages, Every Departure Entails An Arrival Elsewhere, Every Arrival Implies A Departure From Afar.

Popular Success Is A Wonderful Gift If It Happens, But Like Money, It's Not The Motivation. The Effort To Create A Work Of Art That Is True And Potentially Lasting, That Is The Very Best Work Of Art You Can Create At That Point In Your Life - A Book That May Only Reach Or Move A Few People But Will Seem To People Somehow Transformative. That's The Ideal; That's Always The Motivation.

I Measure My Life Out In Books." "you Should Be Measuring Your Life By Living. Correction: You Shouldn't Be Measuring Your Life. What's The Point?

And Then, Into The Fantasy, As Into A Dream, Would Come The Thought: It's Not Like This Anymore; The World Has Changed. Just The Way, Even At That Time Fully Two Years After My Mother's Death, I'd Catch Myself Thinking About Her As Alive; And Would Suddenly Remember, An Admonitory Finger Of Grief Upon My Breast, That She Was Gone.