Like other geniuses, he was, I believe, especially able to stay in touch with his right brain, find the connections others would miss, the relationships between parts of his own life. And he would find exactly the right thing to say at times, in the right way.
As in:
This cat book is an allegory, in which the writer's past life is presented to him in a cat charade. Not that the cats are puppets. Far from it. They are living, breathing creatures, and when any other being is contacted, it is sad: because you see the limitations, the pain and fear and the final death. That is what contact means. That is what I see when I touch a cat and find that tears are flowing down my face.
from Burroughs' The Cat Inside