Question: What impresses me most about your Himalayan achievement is that although you have produced a vast quantity of paintings and drawings the quality of your works has increased rather than decreased. How do you explain this?

Sri Chinmoy: I am like a runner. When the starter fires the gun, most of the sprinters at the very outset, for the first ten metres, do not reach their topmost speed. After they have covered ten metres or so, for the remaining ninety metres of the hundred metre dash, they run the fastest. In my case also, in the beginning I had a little bit of hesitation and uncertainty. Art is not familiar to me. In my family my father and my brothers wrote poems. Poetry is something inherent in our family. But in our family nobody showed any interest in art in the form of painting. It is something that is totally new to me. That is why I had a little bit of hesitation when I first started. Then I shook off that hesitation. The inner urge was so powerful in me to serve the Supreme in another form of creativity, that there was no necessity on my part to hesitate for long. I have to serve the Supreme as devotedly, as powerfully and as quickly as possible.