"Maybe madness is the excess of possibility...and writing is about reducing possibility to one idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad...my language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader."
from Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker

"...two kinds of loneliness...of absolute solitude- the physical fact of living alone, working alone, as I have always done. This need not be painful, for many writers it's necessary...Being alone for most of the day means you listen to different rhythms, which are not determined by other people...But there's another kind of loneliness which is terrible to endure...and that is the loneliness of seeing a different world than that of the people around you. Their lives remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can't. You live among them. They walk on earth. You walk on glass. They reassure themselves with conformity, with carefully constructed resemblances. You are masked, aware of your absolute difference."
from Hallucinating Foucault by Patricia Duncker