Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to.

What made me empathic was my depressions.

The mania is like wasps under the skin, like my head's going to explode with ideas.

It's no fun feeling your thoughts are being controlled by an electrode, and someone else is holding the clicker.

Neurology and psychiatry should be treating the same organ.

A creative idea will be defined simply as one that is both novel and useful or influential in a particular social setting.

Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to.