So why sign your name in blood for more? It seemed like a sensible arrangement for me. I didn't sell large numbers of records and the record company paid advances they rarely recouped.

My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters.

In some ways it's taken me decades to come clean and make honest work - and still to this day, sometimes I find myself wanting to hide behind my work and deny the more biographical aspects.

So why sign your name in blood for more? It seemed like a sensible arrangement for me. I didn't sell large numbers of records and the record company paid advances they rarely recouped.

I feel like I'm stepping into a place of spiritual contemplation every time I enter a studio; it's always had a certain magic to me that has never worn off with familiarity.

I didn't really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment.

If you feel driven and compelled to make your work and to be fiercely original and have something unique to say, in a compelling way, then chances are the helpers will be there for you the doors will open some, the ice will crack.

Now I'm having to live with sales of around 50,000 per album - but I'm pretty content with my place in the general scheme of things, even if it's meant I don't drive a fancy car and can't afford grand vacations.

I don't know to what extent someone can BECOME an artist - you either are or you aren't - and if you are you'll HAVE to make your way to some kind of sickly light, no matter how terrible the soil you were seeded in your nature will out somehow.

I've been getting pretty focused about that recently, and even considered doing a masters degree to polish up the craft. I've been pretty lucky in that I seem to have found people online who are willing to constructively tear it apart for me, and indicate its weaknesses.

Whatever the opposite of regret is best describes how I've always felt about that decision - it opened me up to a million creative opportunities I needed to experience away from the bull and distorting mirrors that fame engenders.

I'd make a terrible practitioner of any religion in any formal setting.

I took the process of doing as much myself as I could like a duck to water. I set up my own label and publishing, etc, and it was a fun learning curve two decades ago.

Trust the tale, not the teller.

There's nothing like doing something wrong to learn how it might be done better.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

Oh yeah - for sure - hardly a week doesn't go by when I don't hear something wonderful that someone has made in some low-budget situation, primarily with a view to selling a few hundred copies at their concerts.

The school was prone to dishing out punishments for anything creative that didn't fit with expectation - I just followed the logic and figured the folk club was probably much the same.

Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing.

Twice a week I would receive injections or IV's of Factor VIII which clotted the blood and then broke it down.

Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.

Keep your blood clean, your body lean, and your mind sharp.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.

I had no blood relatives till I made some.

I know that I'm very lucky to be alive. For 35 or 40 years I've spilt my blood and broke my bones and spent years in hospitals.

Don't forget that the only two things people read in a story are the first and last sentences. Give them blood in the eye on the first one.

It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is.

I say to you that the price of liberty is and always has been blood, human blood, and if our liberties are lost, we shall never regain them except at the price of blood. They must not be lost.

Once blood is shed in a national quarrel reason and right are swept aside by the rage of angry men.

I would give up everything rather than have the blood of white men upon the hands of my people.

I don't need power at the cost of spilled blood.

There are two times of the year that stir the blood. In the fall, for the hunt, and now for lacrosse.

It has been said that the position of woman is the test of civilization, and that of our women was secure. In them was vested our standard of morals and the purity of our blood.

It consists entirely of people who are not related by blood, many of whom can't stand each other.

Basketball is in my blood. It is my obligation to try.

The masses don't shed their blood for the benefit of a few individuals.

Blood and death. That moves me.

It chills my blood to hear the blest Supreme Rudely appealed to on each trifling theme.

Each of us needs something - food, liquor, pot, whatever - to help us survive. Dracula needs blood.

Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable.

But the love of adventure was in father's blood.

Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression a symbolic utterance... Everything is of the blood, of the senses.

God bless the Union; - it is dearer to us for the blood of brave men which has been shed in its defence.

Well, it gives, certainly to my father, who is the one that suffered the most in our family, and understanding of how the ideals of a country are only as good as the people who give it flesh and blood.

The striking thing about the Precious Blood is the bond it establishes between love and suffering in our experience, a bond that has become so close that we have come to think of suffering accepted with joy as the most authentic sign of love with any depth at all.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.