Nick Flynn Quotes

I myself have suffered periodically from hearing voices at night when I'm trying to sleep.

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

If I thought the Lord was speaking to me I'd check myself into Bellevue, and I think you should too.

When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.

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

The United States were a 35-year-old man, I think he'd be in a mental institution. Violent tendencies - delusions of grandeur - medicate heavily.

Don't talk to the crazy kids. I longed to shout back that we weren't crazy. I'd mistaken her kid for a ghost, that's all. I wondered whether they had books about his sort of thing. Fifty Ways to Tell the Living from the Dead Before You Wind Up in a Padded Room. Yep, I'm sure the library carried that one.

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.

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.

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. The doctor/psychiatrist figures in my writing are alter egos of a kind, what I would have been had I not become a writer - a personal fantasy that I've fed into my fiction.

He had delusions of adequacy.

Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.

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

In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.

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.

How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination.

In a psychiatric hospital, a lot of people believe that people on TV are talking to them directly through the screen. I'm with about 500 of these people, and I'm on TV every Friday night. As I was queuing up for breakfast one morning, one guy nearly jumped out of his skin. My first thought was to go 'Woooo!'

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.

... the work of lunatics.

... a paranoid person with delusions.