I had this sense that I was part of, sort of a lineage of artists and writers through history that have had mood disorders.

I think that Van Gogh is really the ultimate crazy artist that we all think of.

A sense of electrical current was part of my own experience of being manic. The sensation that my mind was spinning and overheating would sometimes build to a sensation like an electrical short - a burst of light, a melting, or dissipating - and I'd get a metallic taste in my mouth, like when you lick a battery.

I just really respond to comics. I find it a really exciting medium.

Never forget that the key to the situation lies in the will and not in the imagination.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

That period, doing 'Angels in America' in '94 and then filming with 'Basquiat' in '95, those were gateway years for me as an artist. Two gateways, one into the film industry and one into the world of theater, each formative to me in different, equally essential ways.

Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited - that has music and rhythm and time.