Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

They're caught where there's no way out or where you can't see out. What are you going to do about it? I don't have the answer. If I did there would be no insane asylums. But I see a lot of people, a lot of my friends in the same predicament. Many times in my life, I was there myself.

And men, whose reason long was blind, From cells of madness unconfined, Oft lose whole years of darker mind.

As psychotic as it gets outside, the comic can be more psychotic.

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

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

I had, toward the last, been shut off from all visitors, and so when the lawyer, Peter A. Hendricks, came and told me that friends of mine were willing to take charge of me if I would rather be with them than in the asylum, I was only too glad to give my consent.

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 don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad.

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

Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad - because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying 'You're mad, you're mad.'

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

It takes madness to find out madness.

I'll die a crazy old man!

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.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

I'll say it loud and say it proud. I'm completely insane.

... madness entered my veins.

I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons within the Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens—chained naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.

Is Mr. [John Quincy] Adams demented, or is he perversely wicked? Both, I think, and Adams ought to be confined to a hospital.

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

I can only presume that you have gone out of your mind.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

I've always been a lunatic.

I'm a lunatic.