I always thought that an artist's was the hardest life of all. Its rigor—not always apparent to an outside observer—is that an artist has to navigate forward into the unknown guided only by an internal sense of direction, keep up a set of standards which are imposed entirely from within, meanwhile maintaining faith that the task he has set himself to is worth struggling constantly to achieve. This is all contrary to the notion of bohemian disorder.
~ Lucian Freud
A lot of us were fooled by the myth that we needed to derange our senses to be true artists. Those who figured it in town got some real work done, or those with a sense of self-preservation that overcame the distractions.