No experience we have can be transferred into art. I think it has to be transformed into art. The terms of art are very different from the terms of life. Forms can be imposed on both, but they are very different forms. We know what kinds of forms we're talking about when we're talking about the sonnet and the novel, with chapters and sequence and so on.
Life can have order, but very often that order is hard to detect.
That's why we have ritual and patterns, and so on, that we rely on. Using experience as a basis for art is, of course, primarily what we have to work with, but it's never a matter of looking at that experience in terms of factual information. But looking at experience in terms of a kind of larger truth about it that has to be reshaped. I had enough failures in my own attempts to know that it has to be done in a certain way before it works. Well, I think of myself as an ideal reader.