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.

If you can imagine missing feeling sad, it's the only thing worse than pain.

Imagine having love for someone and being told, "You're not allowed to experience that love because you're not allowed to experience pain." It's a dilemma that so many people with bipolar can't reconcile. They can't find a way out of it. The truth is that you can have both.

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."

If people are saying that somehow their connection is going to be detrimental to their health, of course they are going to reject that idea, because that's the power of falling like that.

I feel much more emotion than I did before, and more meaningful emotion and richer emotion than when I was manic. I'm able to experience meaningful things that can only be experienced when I'm stable, like a family.

Emotions are what drives everyone. You get up in the morning and go do something because the emotion drives you to it.