The reason creativity and craziness go together is that if you're just plain crazy without being able to sing or dance or write good poems, no one is going to want to have babies with you. Your genes will fall by the wayside. Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?

In my more lucid moments I realized that insanity was a fairly reasonable explanation for what was happening to me. The problem was that it wasn't useful information. Realizing I was crazy didn't make the crazy stuff stop happening. Nor did it give me any clues about what I should do next.

For me to have sat around calling the crazy stuff "crazy" would have been the most wasteful, unimaginative thing I could have done. There were so many much better things to do with it.

There are no people anywhere who don't have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look. What is a myth is that we are mostly mentally well most of the time.

And if you're lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, 'How all right can he be?

Until we come up with an unequivocal blood test or the equivalent, we're all blowing smoke and don't know if what we call schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are one disorder or a dozen.