Some people find it exceedingly difficult to get along with me and I have to choose my jobs very carefully. I have no patience with phonies, dolts, or obnoxious incompetents and I take some pride in the fact that these people invariably dislike me. I admire perfection or any effort toward it and I would not work with anyone who disagreed with me on this score. 
- Hunter S. Thompson, in a job application as a young man.

That came after, I think, a short stint as a writer at a bowling magazine. That belief in himself eventually allowed him to put some fascinating if unorthodox work out into the world.

In the 1950s, Frank Barron, a research psychologist at UC Berkeley, surveyed people in a wide variety of creative fields -- artists, sculptors, writers, mathematicians, physicists -- asking them who were the most creative people in their particular areas of work. Then he extensively interviewed those chosen by their peers. Here are some of his conclusions from a 1958 article in Scientific American, "The Psychology of Imagination." 

The creative individual in his generalized preference for apparent disorder turns to the dimly realized life of the unconscious, and is likely to have more than the usual amount of respect for the forces of the irrational in himself and in others ... To put the matter more strongly, I believe that the creative individual not only respects the irrational in himself, but courts it as the most promising source of novelty in his own thoughts. He rejects the demand of society that he should shun in himself the primitive, the uncultured, the naive, the magical, the nonsensical; that he must be a "civilized" member of the community. Creative individuals reject this demand because they want to own themselves totally and because they perceive a shortsightedness in the claim of society that all its members should adapt themselves to a norm for a given time and place. When an individual thinks in ways which are customarily tabooed, his fellows may regard him as mentally unbalanced ... 

In my view ... this kind of imbalance is more likely to be healthy than unhealthy. The truly creative individual stands ready to abandon all classifications and to acknowledge that life, particularly his own unique life, is rich with new possibilities. To him disorder offers the potentiality of order. They [creative people] have exceptionally broad and flexible awareness of themselves -- the self is strongest when it can regress, admit primitive fantasies, naive ideas, tabooed impulses into consciousness and behavior, and yet to return to a high degree of rationality and self-criticism. The creative person is both more primitive and more cultured -- more destructive and constructive -- crazier and saner than the average person.