Vincent van Gogh was sane when he painted that piece of art, because when you you feel the mania and depression, you have all the heaven and hell your heart has ever experienced that you can tap into, to be able to create something that can last several lifetimes.

Fellini was [David] Lynch's master and his biggest idol, and he believed in Fellini's view that film is a dream, it's not reality. It's all about delving into the unconscious.

Vincent van Gogh was sane when he painted that piece of art, because when you you feel the mania and depression, you have all the heaven and hell your heart has ever experienced that you can tap into, to be able to create something that can last several lifetimes.

When you encounter that first love, a young love, you do feel that your story is original. You are utterly convinced that your story has never been told before, because it hasn't.

That is the beauty when I discovered the label 'Touched With Fire.' That book defined it for me, I could be that. And we just happen to be living in one age of society that put these various labels on the condition. In Aristotle's time, it was the 'inspired state.' In the Native American cultures, you were the shaman. Labels and language creates realities, even if they are false.

Do you think you can love too much? Or experience too much beauty, at the cost of too much pain? Do you think when art is defined by expressing so much beauty and so much pain, just to be able to cope with both - and bring other people something creatively beautiful at the cost of that pain - that we can draw a line of 'normalcy'? It's important to think about.

The patient needs to believe that they can keep the fire while being medicated. The doctors must tell them, "I understand that you experienced something beautiful. I understand that you saw the stars pulsing spirals of fire across the sky like Van Gogh did when he was looking outside the sanitarium window. But you know what? He didn't paint ['Starry Night'] when he was manic. He painted it when he was sane because he didn't need the mania to have the magic."