"“It’s too easy to get dispirited in this cruel and hazardous world,” he said, looking at you trustfully. “Yet, we must carry on with our lives, and, more than that, we must find the strength to create. As I remind my patients, bitterness, depression, even shattering despair are transfiguring powers that potentially accompany and corrupt every creative endeavour, because creativity is, as the mythologists insist, an intrusion into the inviolable realm of deity—of abstraction—where we with our spastic actuality can never fully go. How dare we grotesque notochords create anything in this frigid and entropic universe? It takes a lot of arrogance, don’t you think? One has to give everything to create anything.”"