Tyler Sypherd asked Alan Moore:

Everyone is crazy, but some people are Genius Crazy (writers, poets, artists etc) or Crazy Crazy (psychopaths, politicians, Marlon Brando while filming Apocalypse Now) Or at least this is what I believe. My question is do you believe this as well and if so, do you think being one or both makes helps in making a great writer or does it have nothing to do with that?

Alan Moore I think perhaps a more useful way of looking at it is that ‘craziness’ and ‘sanity’ are both social constructions that actually mean very little and depend upon each other for definition: a crazy person is someone who isn’t sane, and a sane person is someone who isn’t crazy. Given that these definitions are coming from a culture that, in several thousand years, has failed to come up with an adequate theory to describe or account for simple human consciousness, I don’t see that its purely social definition of whether a given person is in some way ‘abnormal’ or not can have any real basis or meaning. Basically, I’m not entirely certain that craziness and sanity actually exist or mean anything, and I am even less sure of the contemporary definition of genius. Genius used to be a word denoting the actual divine spark of inspiration that would enter and briefly animate a person, rather than a word bestowed upon the person themselves. I think it would probably better for human beings, with our delicate psychologies and ego-structures, to accept that if we were very lucky great art or genius may work through us, but that doesn’t mean that we ourselves are either great art, or a genius. As for whether you need to be some variety of crazy to be a great artist, I would say that what you need to be in order to achieve great art is completely and fiercely be yourself. This may, or may not, see you classified as crazy, but as remarked above, I think that it’s our largely meaningless classifications, regarding a subject of which we clearly understand nothing, that are a big part of the problem.

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