Anne Sexton Quotes

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

You can't be a proper writer without a touch of madness, can you?

Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

All artists are crazy.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

I've never had any problem with crazy people. I like crazy people; I probably am a crazy person myself.

People think I'm nuts.

… there is a correlation between the creative and the screwball. So we must suffer the screwball gladly.

I think that all creative people are a little bit nuts.

Writers on the subject of August Strindberg have hitherto omitted to mention that he could not write. ... Strindberg, who was neither a good nor a wise man, had a stroke of luck. He went mad. He lost the power of inhibition. Everything down to the pettiest suspicion that the dog had been given the leanest mutton chop, poured out of his lips. Men of his weakness and sensuality are usually, from their sheer brutishness, unable to express themselves. But Strindberg was mad and articulate. That is what makes him immortal.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

A great artist is a great man in a great child.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

I really love the idea of the poetically mad - the character that is imbued with the romantic madness. Like River from 'Firefly' or Drusilla from 'Buffy.' Someone dangerously unhinged, where you're really not sure they're going to be reliable minute-to-minute.

For the most part, works of mine are untitled. There was a brief period where I had poetic titles for works, and they're embarrassing now. I think, for the most part, it's not something that I have talent for.

I talk to a lot of people who, when you try to sum them up in a couple of sentences, seem like they must be insane.

I'm crazy and I don't pretend to be anything else.

I don't think people are fans of me because I wrote hit songs. I think they're fans because I'm a lunatic or a weirdo. The hit songs came out of my idiosyncratic personality, not the other way around.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

Poets are born, not paid.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.