Lydia Millet 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.

If I had known being insane was so much fun, I'd have gone crazy long ago.

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.

He was a psychotic. He was a borderline psychotic. He was a terrific, sensational actor, with a magical screen presence, you couldn't keep your eyes off him, but he was paranoid. He was sure everybody was out to get him.

The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness.

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

I only hear my own voice. When you start hearing other voices, then it's time to worry.

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.

Even in my first analysis of a depressive psychosis, I was immediately struck by its structural similarity with obsessional neurosis.

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.

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.

Schizophrenia is hearing voices, not doing voices.

The schizophrenic has no sense of humor. His world is a constantly daunting, unfriendly place.

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.

A monomaniac is a sick person whose mentality is perfectly healthy in all respects but one; he has a single flaw, clearly localized. At times, for example, he has an unreasonable and absurd desire to drink or steal or use abusive language; but all his other acts and all his other thoughts are strictly correct.

Perhaps I'm absolutely bonkers and don't know it. Perhaps I'm psychotically mental.

... madness entered my veins.

... a paranoid person with delusions.

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

I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium, and symptoms of schizophrenia.

I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic.

My mother became mentally unwell with schizophrenia when I was in my teens... We couldn't watch television because she thought the people on TV were sending her messages. She thought there were hidden cameras everywhere, so we had to have the curtains drawn.