I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf.

Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting.

A program of active reading and writing might be the hardest form of thinking, but it is also the most organized methodology of self-education. Reading exposes the mind to a world of ideas heretofore unimaginable and encourages the novice learner to write. Reading is a form a joint mediation and writing represents the product of several authors’ collective and collaborative minds at work.