Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things - pg. 113

Most artists bore you to tears in their lives, anyway, because they refuse ever to forget how things felt. They don't know how to play "New Day," nor can they successfully turn memory into sentiment. This trait of the artist is often confused with bitterness or cynicism, but it is simply an insistence upon remembering the specific emotional responses that were once actual. All frozen in the artist's nerve centers, so that at any moment he may embarrass the company by some remark better left unsaid. His life a clutter of dead event, preserved with the exquisite care of a master taxidermist. Never can tell when some of those dusty birds up in the attic might come in handy.