The truth is that life could never in all its life get on without the morbid; and anything more stupid would be hard to find than the saying that from disease only disease can come. Life is not fastidious: one may truthfully say creative genius, genius-purveying disease, taking its obstacles on high horse, leaping exultant from crag to crag, is a thousand times dearer to it than healthiness trudging afoot Life is not nice: remote from its thought is any distinction between sickness and health. It clutches the daring products of disease, consumes and digests them, and what it does with them makes them health.

Thomas Mann