Artist's Struggle for Integrity

Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion. In this sense, all artists are divorced from and even necessarily opposed to any system whatever. 
The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but  that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You are bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face, least of all the hypothetical misfit who has not learned how to walk or talk and doesn't know enough about experience to know what experience he has had. 
And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what's important. Everybody's hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive... You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people's pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too.
When I was very young... I assumed that... [no] one had suffered the way I suffered. Then you discover.. that it is common. Everybody did it... It's a fantastic and terrifying liberation. The reason it is terrifying is because it makes you once and for all responsible to no one but yourself...And not only do we all know how difficult it is, given what we are, to tell the difference between right and wrong, but the whole nature of life is so terrible that somebody's right is always somebody else's wrong. And these are the terrible choices one has always got to make.
.. 'Why are you so serious all the time? You can't write all the time, Jimmy. Relax' Have you ever had anyone tell you to relax? 
All right, you get through all that and you make your first breakthrough, people have heard your name- and here comes the world again... you must decide all over again whether you want to be famous or whether you want to write. And the two things, in spite of all the evidence, have nothing whatever in common.
And yet people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don't know you... if you have hat funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define- you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you... It is impersonal. This force which you didn't ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don't cheat, if you don't lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope- because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it.
 【！！！】
You can only have it by letting it go. You can only take if you are prepared to give, and giving is not an investment. It is a not a day at the bargain counter. It is a total risk of everything, of you and who you think you are, who you think you'd like to be, where you think you'd like to go- everything, and this forever, forever.
If I spend weeks and months avoiding my typewriter... then one has got to use this to learn humility. After all, there is a kind of saving egotism too, a cruel and dangerous but also saving egotism, about the artist's condition, which is this: I know that if I survive it, when the tears have stopped flowing or when the blood has dried, when the storm has settled, I do have a typewriter which is my torment but is also my work. If I can survive it, I can always go back there, and if I've not turned into a total liar, then I can use it and prepare myself in this way for the next inevitable and possibly fatal disaster. But if I find that hard to do- and I have a weapon which most people don't have- then one must understand how hard it is for almost anybody else to do it at all.