Oliver Sacks Quotes

My experience is that when one is in psychosis, you're on a mission and nothing is going to stop you. At some level your brain is telling you you probably shouldn't be doing this, but you're on a mission.

After a century of studying schizophrenia, the cause of the disorder remains unknown.

Schizophrenia is hearing voices, not doing voices.

Now, I'm no doctor, but I am on TV. And in my professional opinion, George W. Bush is a paranoid schizophrenic. ...

Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.

The schizophrenic mind is not so much split as shattered. I like to say schizophrenia is like a waking nightmare.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.

I'm sure I'm a schizophrenic. The problem is I can't tell the difference between which one's which, which one is the real me.

Never get into an argument with a schizophrenic person and say, 'Who do you think you are?'

Hearing voices no one else can hear isn't a good sign, even in the wizarding world.

Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic, and so am I.

... the work of lunatics.

... a paranoid person with delusions.

I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic.

He stares at me, and then leans back in his chair. "He's ill, Jacob." I say nothing. "He's a paragon schnitzophonic." "He's what?!" "Paragon schnitzophonic," repeats Uncle Al. "You mean paranoid schizophrenic?" "Sure. Whatever. But the bottom line is he's mad as a hatter.

No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.

My mother is schizophrenic. I would love to be brave enough to learn more about it. I try to understand her, I try to be positive about it. She can be so absent and tired by her medication; sometimes she's so lucid, funny, and smart.

A schizophrenic is a person who already has a natural tendency to absent himself from this world.

Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.

That Sid Vicious was obviously a schizophrenic, kind of a mean one too.

I must have been heavily schizophrenic all my life. The me who hears what the other me can't play is the dominant one.

It's getting harder and harder to differentiate between schizophrenics and people talking on a cell phone. It still brings me up short to walk by somebody who appears to be talking to themselves.

The whole schizophrenia angle interested me. When I first started working on it, I thought I would play up that angle more than I ended up doing. The religious aspect of the story was also a draw.

Schizoaffective disorder is a big mental mash-up of a disease. It combines just about every disorder, from depression, delusions, and paranoia to mania, schizophrenia and hallucinations. My mother bounced between all of these regularly while raising me alone in our Hollywood home.

The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.