on being a true artist

The single-mindedness of those who make rather than fake art is interpreted as diffidence, arrogance, madness, cruelty, remoteness, paranoia. Freud called it sublimation and wish-fulfillment. The common theory of the artist as one possessed is well known, but I think it truer to call the artist one in possession; in full possession of a reality less partial than the reality apprehended by most people. The artist cannot occupy middle ground, and the warm nooks of humanity are not for her, she lives on the mountainside, in the desert, on the sea. The condition of the artist is a condition of Remove.
I do not mean that artists live like monks, of course they don’t, and nor do I mean that artists live in shacks. Michelangelo had five palaces and the only reason that Mozart is buried in a pauper’s grave is that he spent everything he was given and died young. The myth of the impoverished artist is as badly sourced as the myth of the mad artist. A list would reveal quite a different story. The condition of Remove is rather like the allegiance of the knight who is glad to eat drink and be merry but listening always for the insistent voice, the work to be done above all things else.

- Jeanette Winterson, "A Work of My Own" pg 168, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.