One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.
—Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American Sociologist
Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?
—Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) American Dancer, Choreographer
In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!
—J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) English Novelist, Short Story Writer
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
—Ezra Pound (1885-1972) American Poet, Translator, Critic
The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
—R. D. Laing (1927–89) Scottish Psychiatrist
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s the drowning out of false voices.
—Don DeLillo (b.1936) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French Actor, Drama Theorist
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
—R. D. Laing (1927–89) Scottish Psychiatrist
But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
—Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American Novelist, Poet
Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American Novelist
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
—Andre Gide (1869–1951) French Novelist