Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche

8. Towards a psychology of the artist.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. Intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the entire machine: no art results before that happens. All kinds of intoxication, however different their origin, have the power to do this: above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive form of toxication. Likewise the intoxication which comes in the train of all great desires, all strong emotions; the intoxication of feasting, of contest, of the brave deed, of victory, of all extreme agitation; the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction; intoxication under certain meteorological influences, for example the intoxication of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; finally the intoxication of the will, the intoxication of an overloaded and distended will. -- The essence of intoxication is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy. From out of this feeling ones gives to things, one compels them to take, one rapes them -- one calls this procedure idealizing....

9. In this condition one enriches everything out of one's own abundance: what one sees, what one desires, one sees swollen, pressing, strong, overladen with energy. The man in this condition transforms things until they mirror his power -- until they are reflections of his perfection. This compulsion to transform into the perfect is -- art. Even all that which he is not becomes for him none the less part of his joy in himself; in art, man takes delight in himself as perfection.

pg. 82-83