From The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1970), by Henry Miller.

To live beyond the pale, to work for the pleasure of working, to grow old gracefully while retaining one’s faculties, one’s enthusiasm, one’s self-respect, one has to establish other values than those endorsed by the mob. It asks an artist to make this breach in the wall. An artist is primarily one who has faith in himself. He does not respond to the normal stimuli; he is neither a drudge nor a parasite. He lives to express himself and in so doing enriches the world.