Art #10

The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself.
Any cleanness I have in my own life is due to my feeling for words.
The fools who write articles about me think that one morning I suddenly decided to write and begun to produce masterpieces.
There is no special trick about writing or painting either. I wrote constantly for 15 years before I produced anything with any solidity to it.
For days, weeks, and months now I can’t do it.
You saw me in Paris this winter. I was in a dead, blank time. you have to live through such times all your life.
The thing, of course, is to make yourself alive. Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor.
The point of being an artist is that you may live.

Sherwood Anderson to John Anderson, from Troutdale, Virginia (April? 1927)