Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art, you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest.

Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?

My only hope was to be polite.

Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible.

None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.

Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.