We do not seem to be finding tomorrow's Toscas.
I think there are a lot of dudes out there that are runnin' out of gas. Some of my favourites, even ones I look up to... I haven't been fully impressed with their dynamics of makin' a body of work that makes sense to me.
I believe an artist dies twice. The first time, it's just terrible - I've been there when the phone isn't ringing for years.
The thing I worry about is, what happens when your talent flees? Because you see that with writers sometimes: they start writing these awful books. And there's something sort of horrifying about it.
When you blink, you're on the back end of your career.
Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing.
I can't play piano like I used to either. I used to have bass rolling like thunder. I can't do that no more. But I ask the Lord, please forgive me for the stuff I done trying to make a nickel.
I've always considered music stores to be the graveyards of musicians.
I am always watching for fear of getting feeble and passé in my work. I don't want to trickle out. I want to pour till the pail is empty, the last bit going out in a gush, not in drops.
The draining away of James Baldwin's magic was a drama much discussed in the years leading up to his death in 1987 at the age of sixty-three.
I'm an aging show pony and they trot me out here and there.
My voice had a long, nonstop career. It deserves to be put to bed with quiet and dignity, not yanked out every once in a while to see if it can still do what it used to do. It can't.
I've watched people who were better actors than me disappear, and they're selling insurance now.
There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.
I go to the movies a lot, and I regret when I see some actor that I used to like, to find them offering no more surprises.
The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
And sometimes you look at the first poems by someone and you go, "They have freshness and a sense of wonder that is never recaptured again by that poet."
I mean, look how many musicians have come through and played beside me, and I'm workin' and they're not.
It would be sad if my best work had been 20 years ago and now I only had memories.
Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
For poetry, he's past his prime, He takes an hour to find a rhyme; His fire is out, his wit decayed, His fancy sunk, his muse a jade. I'd have him throw away his pen, But there's no talking to some men.
