Rodney Elrod: Why do you think writers like Pynchon, Salinger, and Faulkner go into hiding for so long?

Harry Crews: This may sound a little hippy-dippy, but all writers of any significance are tremendously sensitive. That is to say, sensitive to criticism, to social pressures, and I think that the people you mentioned do that, though none of them would admit it, because they recognize their own intense vulnerability, which they don’t deal with out there, so they hide.

Much of the creative process involves sensitivity. It involves really seeing. What’s the deeper meaning here? What is really going on? When you remove the superfluous, the repetitive, the unnecessary, the bullshit, what remains? Paint that. Write that. Where’s the juice? What do you really think? Let us in on that.

I recognize quality very quickly, instantly, I mean. And I recognize the absence of quality. . . in politics, as well as the arts. I think I recognize a charlatan when I see one, whether he’s practicing his charlatanism in painting, in music, or in ideas. . . I’m able, I believe, to see through to the heart of a matter rather more quickly than the average person.

I can perceive falseness in a gesture, in a sentence, written or spoken — when an actor is acting instead of being, when a writer is writing instead of perceiving, observing. All these things have become instruments in my
service.
- John Huston, movie director. I think I copied this down from a Fresh Air interview.

Auguste Rodin said of the first time he saw clay, "I felt I was going up to heaven. . . I understood everything at once. . . I was in thrall." When he talked about his work, he described his deepest aspiration as revealing "the hidden meaning of all things." He saw art as "one of the paths to a deep knowledge of reality" and sought to bring his sculptures to life, to reveal "expressive truth." In how he described his purpose he saw the question: Where is the truth in the "matter"?   
 - Laura Carroll, Your Life Quest