John Guare on Writing

This is from the preface to the Dramatists Play Service edition of Six Degrees of Separation:

A writer learns his or her life as a writer is entrusted to work being done in a room, a studio, an atelier not at the top of a stair but hidden somewhere within the mind. Why the hell is the place that is most truly us the place that is most inaccessible? And a writer grows to hate that room and its gnawing presence and its inaccessibility. A writer's life becomes a history of the trek of how he or she returns to that room down a path as trustworthy as mercury. The writer strews the path with booze and drugs or lies and resentments and fear of abandonment and despair and jealousy and self-loathing and hatred that we have lost the way to that path which is most us. Because the inhabitants of that room demand attention when they are ready or else they will drive us mad. You didn't try hard enough to find me. You didn't structure your life in the right way to hear us when we called. But you have to go on living.