John Irving Quotes

That's the terrible part. I swear to God I'm a madman.

Raving mad is quite easy. You just chew up the scenery or something. It's quiet mad that's hard.

I'm a Crank. I'm slowly going crazy. I keep wanting to chew off my own fingers and randomly kill people.

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.

I’m Lila, and yes, he’s crazy. But you must have noticed that before now. He was crazy back when I knew him, and he’s obviously gotten crazier over time.

-You are on the verge of being truly mad. -No, not at all. Look at me. I can tie my shoelaces. See?

Sometimes I think that if I wasn't crazy... I'd go crazy.

It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy.

A large proportion of my best friends are a little bit crazy. ... I try to be cautious with my friends who are too sane. Depression is itself destructive, and it breeds destructive impulses: I am easily disappointed in people who don't get it.

I've been outta my mind a long time.

First sign of madness, talking to your own head.

Mystical state, madness, how it frightens people. How utterly crazy they become, remote, rude, peculiar, cruel, taunting, farouche as wild beasts who have smelled danger, the unthinkable.

I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice.

Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.

It is possible to be truly mad and to still exist upon scraps of life.

There is no insanity so devastating in man's life as utter sanity.

To be crazy is not necessarily to writhe in snake pits or converse with imaginary gods. It can sometimes be not knowing what to do in the morning.

The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

When you're really crazy you don't question it. Being aware of my behaviors stops them. Sure, a lot of people pick their cuticles, but how many people cut big parts of their skin off? It's unfair because I have been judged.

Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.

I was stark raving mad, and my family was too polite to mention it. That's what living with the Yamanis does to people. They get so well-mannered they won't mention you're crazy.

We give people way too much credit. People just get crazy.

Crazy isn´t always what they say it is. It´s not always the old woman wearing sneakers and a skirt and a scarf, wandering around with a shopping cart, hollering at no one, nothing, tumbling through years in her head. No. Sometimes it is a girl wearing boots and jeans and a sweater, arms crossed in front of her, shivering, wandering through the streets at night, all night, murmuring to no one, nothing, tumbling through the strange unreal dimensions in her head.