Edna O'Brien Quotes

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.

I've always wondered if, at some point, everything will snap, and it'll be like 'Alice in Wonderland,' where the delightfully mad people turn into sinister mad people.

There is no difference between acute schizophrenia and a world at war.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

I have this really morbid, awesome love for the movie 'Black Swan.'

The United States is a madhouse.

Let me be accurate in everything, for though you and I have seen some strange things together, you may at the first think that I, Van Helsing, am mad. That the many horrors and the so long strain on nerves has at the last turn my brain.

Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.

It takes madness to find out madness.

When I was a child, I felt at times that I had been born into an insane asylum, that much of human life appeared to be an insane asylum. It was bewildering.

America is a lunatic asylum.

The human race consists of the dangerously insane and such as are not.

I've always been interested in obsessive, insane people.

Most of the depressions are self-created. A few people are pathologically ill: they cannot help it. It just comes from within because of genetic and other factors. But almost everybody else can be driven to madness, because the line between sanity and insanity is quite thin.

Crazy gets all the knives.

I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?

Hold it, Doc, a world war passed through my brain. He said, Nurse, get your pad, this boy's insane.

I've been outta my mind a long time.

Paranoia, the destroyer.

A schizophrenic war is not an easy thing to deal with.

Sanity brings pain but madness is a vile thing.