Quotes About Insanity

After writing a page, Hemingway would let it float to the ground. He never crumpled pages - he believed that if you crumpled them, you'd be insane in a year.

Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages, but it ended up being a short story. And if it ever happens to me again, I Will Go Insane.

I think you're all mad. But that's part and parcel of being an artistic genius, isn't it?

Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood.

I think if one wants to be in a continual state of insanity one should stay married to that writing partner.

she had been perfectly agreeable until I showed my face. That's how it is with that kind of madness. Ninety-nine per cent of the time they seem perfectly sane.

If, he said, Richard wanted to plead guilty, so be it. However, he pointed out to Richard that an insanity plea might be the way to go. Richard didn't like that idea and shot it right down; he was not, he said, insane. He was different, and he followed the dictates of his own mind and desires, rather than a hypocritically dogmatic society's, he said.

Richard didn't want to put on any defense at all. He had continually told his lawyers the trial was a circus and a farce. He refused to take it seriously or give it the dignity of putting on a defense. Clark strongly urged him to plead insanity and try to show the court through expert medical witnesses that he was crazy, but Richard told him he would never plead insanity. He had his pride, his dignity.

It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane.

Now fear had begun, a rational response instead of insanity.

This is a mournful discovery. 1)Those who agree with you are insane 2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.

To rehearse imaginary conversations on paper is called literature. To do so out loud is called madness.

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

The craziest place I've probably ever visited while filming would have to be Jordan. I did a small test shoot for a test movie. We arrived in Jordan, and we stayed in Amman for a night. Then we drove down for three hours into the middle of the Wadi Rum Desert, which is in the absolute middle of nowhere. It was insane.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

I was disappointed, not because we had lost the war but because our people had allowed it to go on for so many years, instead of heeding the few voices of protest against all that mass insanity and slaughter.

Madness isn't altogether a bad thing in comedy.

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice. DONALD BARTHELME, THE DEAD FATHER

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice. DONALD BARTHELME

I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?

Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.

Given all of this, you'd think LeBon's work might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane.

They seemed perfectly ordinary. This, Elliott deduced, was because they were burying their insanity deep beneath a façade of normality.