Looking back, I find so many examples, as though there were a hidden pattern, a matrix of coincidence that invisibly undergirded my life.

is what allows me to schedule, yes, schedule, creativity. It doesn’t drift down and lightly settle upon us like a gauzy visitation from the muse. You have to clear a well-lit and GPS-coordinated landing strip for it.

Because each time we look at pictures—and most of us look at thousands of them these days—we are building and reinforcing a memorial aggregation, a subliminal mimetic impulse, which informs, consciously or not, our artistic output.

lousy context does not necessarily diminish the inchoate, micro-rhizome-like network of opportunity and hope that swells invisibly just below the skeptical surface.

Is it possible that these myriad, time-gobbling intrusions—the crossed-out chores, the appointments, the forgotten fertilizer, the remembered wormer—might actually enrich or refresh the creative mind in some inexplicable and necessary way? It would be nice to think so, since there are so damn many of them. But then, if they don’t, we have to figure

“Trespass.” Early in my career I took to heart an observation from E. L. Doctorow that suggests that transgression is the life and soul of art-making and to be creative you must be in touch with the forbidden.

Your gut language, to whatever degree emphatic, is the first, and last, word on the subject.

It is assumed that each good picture, every resonant poem, each uncracked pot, eases the path for all the subsequent ones, that you get better as you go, not repeating the mistakes of the past and finding inspiration at every turn. But that is not always the case, and I include in these few pages of travel chronology some of the failed pictures

When I look back at earlier years in my Day-Timer, pages heavily leaded with penciled irrelevancies mistaken at the time for urgencies, I wonder what the hell actual creative work I got done in those crowded days and weeks.