This may seem merely like a child’s imagination that gives life to dolls. But it was more than that. I intensely conceived those characters with no need of dolls. Distinctly visible in my ongoing dream, they were utterly human realities for me, which any doll—because unreal—would have spoiled. They were people.
And instead of ending with my childhood, this tendency expanded in my adolescence, taking firmer root with each passing year, until it became my natural way of being. Today I have no personality: I’ve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I’m the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me.
…
This is simply the result of a dramatic temperament taken to the extreme. My dramas, instead of being divided into acts full of action, are divided into souls. That’s what this apparently baffling phenomenon comes down to.
I don’t reject—in fact I’m all for—psychiatric explanations, but it should be understood that all higher mental activity, because it’s abnormal, is equally subject to psychiatric interpretation. I don’t mind admitting that I’m crazy, but I want it to be understood that my craziness is no different from Shakespeare’s, whatever may be the comparative value of the products that issue from the saner side of our crazed minds.
I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.
The hidden side 