Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.

Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these pa

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Arts large and small, major and minor, are always on a constantly turning wheel of invention. One generation’s “Such irony!” is the next generation’s “So obvious!” What makes a great magic trick is not skill alone, nor even performance alone, but skill and performance placed within a story that stays one neat step ahead of the audience’s expectatio

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Works of imagination bleed together with the world they extrapolate from. The writing process begins in the writer, the life; it branches off onto paper, into artifice; but the final restless resting place of every written thing is the solitary life of the reader. There it hibernates, a cluster of stray images, forgotten incitements and conversatio

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