who said there is a fine line between genius and insanity
Oscar Levant Levant was open about his neuroses and hypochondria. The 1920s and 1930s wit Alexander Woollcott, a member of the Algonquin Round Table, once said of him: "There isn't anything the matter with Levant that a few miracles wouldn't cure."[10] Despite his afflictions, Levant was considered a multifaceted genius by some. He himself wisecracked "There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."[11] In later life Levant became addicted to prescription drugs, was frequently committed to mental hospitals by his wife, and increasingly withdrew from the limelight.
Theatre of the Absurd In comparison to Sartre's concepts of the function of literature, Samuel Beckett's primary focus was on the failure of man to overcome "absurdity" - or the repetition of life even though the end result will be the same no matter what and everything is essentially pointless - as James Knowlson says in Damned to Fame, Beckett's work focuses, "on poverty, failure, exile and loss — as he put it, on man as a 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er' ."[57] Beckett's own relationship with Sartre was complicated by a mistake made in the publication of one of his stories in Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes.[58] Beckett said, though he liked Nausea, he generally found the writing style of Sartre and Heidegger to be "too philosophical" and he considered himself "not a philosopher".[59]