"If you are physically unprogrammed in the cultural causa-sui project, then you have to invent your own: you don't vibrate to anyone else's tune.  You see the fabrications of those around you are a lie, a denial of truth - a truth that usually takes the form of showing the terror of the human condition more fully than most men experience it.  The creative person becomes then, in art, literature and religion the mediator of natural terror and the indicator of a new way to triumph over it.  This has been the function of the creative deviant from the shamans to Shakespeare."

- Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death