Art is two parts agency and one part inner heat. The artist loves going down rabbit holes, working toward and against something at the same time, translating sensory and extrasensory impressions that all have their own sovereignty or joy, each of them on a journey to bring something back from a personal underworld, to build a new body out of dispar

This mind wandering is without intention or plan. But, consciously or unconsciously, artists are incapable of not doing it. It is why Dickens prowled city streets at night, Ibsen took long daily walks and Virginia Woolf set out across London. They all sought to absorb the minute details that others might ignore or overlook but that artists collect.

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. —Patti Smith