“I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.”

“Even now I cannot believe that I am still alive and writing this account of the emperor's death. I put my hands to my eyes, wondering if what I am relating here is not all a dream - or maybe it is not a dream: perhaps it is a delusion and I am mad, the victim of some extraordinary and monstrous hallucination. How comes it that when he is dead I am still numbered among the living?”

Anna Comnena book Alexiad

“Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?”

Elie Wiesel book Night

“Are you mad? (Artemis)
Yes, I am. Mad at this world where we are nothing to the gods. Mad at the Fates who put us here for no purpose except to toy with us for their petty amusement. I wish all of the gods were dead and gone. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

“If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

“I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

“We're all mad here. Im mad. You're mad”

Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

“In writing a history of madness, Foucault has attempted-and this is the greatest merit, but also the very infeasibility of his book0to write a history of madness itself. Itself. Of madness itself. That is by letting madness speak for itself.”

Jacques Derrida book Writing and Difference

“I think I am mad sometimes.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer