An excerpt from the blog of Ned Rorem - now a published best-selling book:

Unlike intellectual laymen, artists together talk either money or sex, art being for working hours. My letter may scald the posts of this fascistic zone where for five days I've been confusing the cities of Andalusia without much zeal. Tangier is a dung heap with a view onto paraidse, whereas in, say, Heidelberg you're caught like an ambered fly whose long stare freezes upon human squalor. (What a sentence.) Spain's neither heaven nor hell, merely Italy out of focus.

If the art results from strokes of luck, it follows that an artist is someone who controls his luck. He orders chance. An un-artist (John Cage) is one who chances order.

A meal: is what precedes a cigarette. -December 13, 1961