Genius by Mark Twain

If he throws away every opportunity in life and crushes the affection and the patience of his friends and then protests in sickly rhymes of his hard lot, and finally persists, in spite of the sound advice of persons who have got sense but not any genius, persists in going up some infamous back alley dying in rags and dirt, he is beyond all question a genius. But above all things, to deftly throw the incoherent ravings of insanity into verse and then rush off and get booming drunk, is the surest of all the different signs of genius.