James M. McPherson (1936) American historian
1990s, An Exchange With a Civil War Historian (June 1995)
Source: The Satanic Verses
James M. McPherson (1936) American historian
1990s, An Exchange With a Civil War Historian (June 1995)
“To be Christian is to be one of those whom God has chosen. God has chosen black people!”
James H. Cone (1938–2018) American theologian
Source: Black Theology and Black Power (1969), pp. 139-140
Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist
" Believer Michael Robbins exhibits Maru’s Syndrome on The Dish http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/07/26/believer-michael-robbins-exhibits-marus-syndrome-on-the-dish/" July 26, 2014
“All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017) Bulgarian historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist and essayist
Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)
Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain
And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.
"Good and Bad Reasons for Believing" [open letter to his daughter]
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
Elizabeth Hand (1957) American writer
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.