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.
Complexes http://www.hicsuntleones.co.uk/2009/03/complexes.html, Hic Sunt Leones, 22/03/2009
A Christina Aguilera interview to MSN Live Chat 2000 - Compiled by bignoise.com http://www.bignoisenow.com/christina/msn.html (2000)
"Bill Maher on very scary child predators" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQi-KiO6K2k
Real Time with Bill Maher
Context: That's America for you — a red herring culture, always scared of the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald's, Marlboro and K Street. And recently, there's been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting our children for death. They're called military recruiters. More young Americans were crippled in Iraq last month than in any month in the past three years. And the scandal is that Mark Foley wants to show them a good time before they go? When will our closeted gay congressmen learn? Our boys aren't for pleasure. They're for cannon fodder. They shouldn't be another notch on your bedpost. They should be a comma in Bush's war. If I hear a zipper, it had better be on a body bag. Why aren't Democrats and the media hammering away every day about who we're supposed to be fighting for over there and what the plan is. Yes, Mark Foley was wrong to ask teenagers how long their penises were — but at least someone on Capitol Hill was asking questions. We're the predators. Because we have an entire economy built on asking young people what they want, making the cheapest, sleaziest form of it they'll accept, and selling it to them until they choke on it and die. You know who’s grabbing your kids at too young an age? Merck, Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, by convincing you they're depressed, hyperactive or suffering from attention-deficit disorder and so they must all get medicated. The drug dealers hooking your kids aren't in South America, they're in the halls of Congress handing out campaign donations to your congressmen. Mark Foley says he never slept with those kids, and I believe him, because American children are so hopped up on pills I doubt any of them could get it up. From 1995 to 2002, the number of children prescribed antipsychotic drugs increased by over 400 percent. Either our children are going insane — which we might look on as a problem — or, more likely, we have, for profit, created a nation of little junkies. So stop already with the righteous moral indignation about predators — this whole country is trying to get inside your kid's pants because that's where he keeps the money Daddy gave him to stay out of his hair. I don't care if Mark Foley had been asking boys to describe their penises because I have some sad news for you: Your kid is so larded out on Cheetos and Yoo-hoo, he can't even see his penis. We live in a country where the ultimate consumer is an obese 16-year-old hooked up at one end to a Big Gulp and at the other to a PlayStation. So many of our kids today are fat drug addicts, it's almost as if Rush Limbaugh had had puppies. In conclusion, we can pretend that the biggest threat to “our children” is some creep on the Internet, or we can admit it's Mom and Dad. Because, when your son can't find France on a map, or touch his toes with his hands, or understand that the ads on TV are lying — including the one in which the Marine turns into Lancelot — then the person fucking him is you.
“I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?”
"Baiting the Hook", p. 42
Memory and Dream (1994)
"Realism and Idealism in English Literature (Daniel Defoe - William Blake)," lecture, Università Popolare, Trieste (February 27-28, 1912), printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, <small> ISBN 0-192-83353-7</small>], p. 179
Wonder Boys (1995)
Source: The world goes crazy for Lady Gaga (2009)
Context: I have found that my work has to be both deep and shallow … All of my songs have meaning, all of my clothing has iconography buried into it. But by the same token, it's just as special if you look at it in its shallowest form. A quick moment of melody, a beautiful dress. People think, "Gaga's so sweet", or "Gaga sucks". The point is that it's memorable. For commercial art to be taken seriously as fine art is a very unusual and difficult task. I think that a lot of people don't get it and a lot of people don't know what to make of me. And, you know what? I'm OK with that.
As quoted in " A Brilliant Madness A Beautiful Madness http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/nash/ (2002), PBS TV program; also cited in Doing Psychiatry Wrong: A Critical and Prescriptive Look at a Faltering Profession (2013) by René J. Muller, p. 62
2000s
