How to Find Your Artistic Voice: Ben Folds on Empathy, Creativity, and the Courage to Know Yourself

“What an artist has to offer is obvious to just about anyone else but the artist him- or herself.”

“The best that can be said of my life so far is that it has been industrious, and the best that can be said of me is that I have not pretended to what I was not,” the astronomer Maria Mitchell wrote in her diary at the apogee of her improbable and pathbreaking career as she was reflecting on the art of finding one’s purpose. A century later, in his wonderful advice to young artists, E.E. Cummin...