“I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.”

“Everyone less mentally ill than me is Privileged, everyone more mentally ill than me is Toxic, everyone equally mentally ill to me is Cool,”

“I do want to be careful not to glamorise mental illness when it comes to creativity because more often than not it actually tends to inhibit creativity…”

“books—there is a good kind of a book and a bad kind of a book. I am not to assume that you are all ill acquainted with this; but I may remind you that it is a very important consideration at present. It casts aside altogether the idea that people have that if they are reading any book—that if an ignorant man is reading any book, he is doing rather better than nothing at all.”

“I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.”

“241. An ill wound is cured, not an ill name.”

“766. Better suffer ill than doe ill.”

“If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, — and that is a book honestly come by.”

“Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.”

“I started to work on this book in 1954, when, having been called to active duty in the Navy, I was relieved of the burdens of a full-time psychoanalytic practice… Within a year of its publication, the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene demanded, in a letter citing specifically 'The Myth Of Mental Illness', that I be dismissed from my university position because I did not "believe" in mental illness.”