“I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so.”

Strange Horizons interview (2004)
Context: I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They fall somewhere on the spectrum of being bipolar, of being borderline autistic and so on. These things are there. Now of course these days you can go to college and when you come out you are a professional artist and you can run a gallery as a business and have a career. That is a very valid way for an artist to make a living. But it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that. The scenes in my book that people describe as "such a hallucinatory sequence" … I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot.
So what am I going to do about that? Am I going to go crazy? Am I going to institutionalize myself? Am I going to go and work in a cubicle as a telemarketer so that I don't give vent to that? Or am I going to take that and channel it into my work? It is a gift.

His last words, as quoted in The Home Life of Sir David Brewster (2010), by his daughter, Margaret Maria Gordon. Cambridge University Press. Chapter XXI.

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Variant: Mama, the more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.
Source: Sense and Sensibility

Source: The Tunnel (1995), p. 250

From an interview in the newspaper To-Day (1894), as quoted in Aubrey Beardsley : A Biography (1999) by Matthew Sturgis, p. 200
Context: All humanity inspires me. Every passer-by is my unconscious sitter; and as strange as it may seem, I really draw folk as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into certain lines and angles.

Discrepancies among the Social Sciences (1981)