There was a point when I was 15 or 16 that I realized that my father wanted me to be a loner. I decided, 'It's okay to be an introvert, but I don't want to be a loner. I want a few other people in my life.'

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.

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have. What occurs to people when they read Kurt is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.

Today it’s nice to be able to entertain odd thoughts without having to marry them all. Thank God. I can think whatever the hell I want. Entertaining odd thoughts won’t make you crazy. Refusing to entertain odd thoughts won’t make you well.

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.

Short time here, long time gone. The reason to try to be good, smart, kind, and on the side of angels is because it’s more fun and because there really aren’t any angels.

I can pass for normal most of the time, but I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms – it’s to frighten off extroverts.

After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I’d have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.

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.

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.