What The Artist Owes The World Is

I Never Wanted To Be Well-rounded. I Do Not Admire Well-rounded People Nor Their Work. So Far As I Can See, Nothing Good In The World Has Ever Been Done By Well-rounded People. The Good Work Is Done By People With Jagged, Broken Edges, Because Those Edges Cut Things And Leave An Imprint, A Design.

I First Became Fascinated With The Sears Catalogue Because All The People In Its Pages Were Perfect. Nearly Everybody I Knew Had Something Missing, A Finger Cut Off, A Toe Split, An Ear Half-chewed Away, An Eye Clouded With Blindness From A Glancing Fence Staple. And If They Didn't Have Something Missing, They Were Carrying Scars From Barbed Wire, Or Knives, Or Fishhooks. But The People In The Catalogue Had No Such Hurts. They Were Not Only Whole, Had All Their Arms And Legs And Eyes On Their Unscarred Bodies, But They Were Also Beautiful.

If You're Gonna Write, For God In Heaven's Sake, Try To Get Naked. Try To Write The Truth. Try To Get Underneath All The Sham, All The Excuses, All The Lies That You've Been Told.

Speaks Well Of A Man To Need A Little Something In This World. I Wouldn't Trust A Man Who Could Git Through It Cold Sober.

Writers Spend All Their Time Preoccupied With Just The Things That Their Fellow Men And Women Spend Their Time Trying To Avoid Thinking About. ... It Takes Great Courage To Look Where You Have To Look, Which Is In Yourself, In Your Experience, In Your Relationship With Fellow Beings, Your Relationship To The Earth, To The Spirit Or To The First Cause—to Look At Them And Make Something Of Them.