Some artists identify so closely with their own work that were they to cease producing, they fear they would be nothing — that they would cease existing.
All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work