The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
There was a DJ who stayed up for eleven days straight, the longest-recorded period of time anyone has ever gone without sleep, and he started playing nothing but Crosby, Stills and Nash, and that's how they knew it was time to call the ambulance.
All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.
'Pumped Up Kicks' is written from the perspective like Truman Capote wrote 'In Cold Blood' or Dostoevsky wrote 'Crime & Punishment.' It's psychologically breaking down someone's state of mind and diving in and walking in their shoes.
I have a plan-to go mad.
There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.
The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is 'Don't talk about the psychological meltdown.'
But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.
I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it's the best available option at the time.
Once the voices are in your head, it's either make a movie or kill a lot of people.
In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.
Every god is a jealous god after the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
I've been dictating to my son, who's helping me on his computer. I'm spending a lot of time doing research - I've just got up to 1971, when I went crazy and dived through the window. My life is so full of interesting stories.
People break down after a couple of hours. All the defenses go down, and there's a kind of communication that if I spent 20 years in a living room with one of these people, I would never, never know as much about them as I do in that one day.
I felt myself being invaded through and through, I crumbled, disintegrated, and only emptiness remained.
There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.
And everyone must lose his mind, everyone must! The sooner the better! It is essential — I know it.
Madness is a kind of mental suicide.
If we lose our sanity ... We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness.
The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.
Acid gave me a clinical, unblinking look at madness, and I discovered I wasn't brave enough to be insane.
Perhaps this is what it means to go mad: to be emptied and to be aware of the emptiness.
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
I became entirely given over to extreme dread. The fear was so powerful that it seemed to make my personality completely evaporate... 'Whitley' ceased to exist. What was left was a body and a state of raw fear so great that it swept about me like a thick, suffocating curtain, turning paralysis into a condition that seemed close to death...I died and a wild animal appeared in my place.
It got to the point where I sat on the side of the bed in a hotel room in London in early-1990 and said to whoever or whatever: 'If you are there will you please contact or leave me because you are driving me up the wall.'
