“What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice — that is, madness is a dandy theatrical element. It focuses the audience's attention and increases suspense, since you never know what a mad person may get up to next; and Shakespeare himself makes use of it in many forms. In King Lear, there's a scene in which one man pretending to be mad, another who has really gone mad, and a third who has probably always been a little addled, are brought together for purposes of comparison, irony, pathos, and tour de force acting. In Hamlet, there are two variations — Hamlet himself, who assumes madness, and Ophelia, who really does go winsomely bonkers. In MacBeth, it's Lady MacBeth who snaps.”

“Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”

“What is life if a man cannot count on his friends when he has gone mad?”

“What madness has seized you?”
Quae te dementia cepit!

“Envying another man's happiness is madness; you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it.”

“That in you which recognizes madness as madness (even if it is your own) is sanity, is the arising awareness, is the end of insanity.”

“Madness and insanity are two terms that are so vague and relative that you can’t really apportion proper values to them. The only thing I can think of that has any use it functional and dysfunctional. Are you working as well? In which case, it doesn’t matter if you are mad.”

“The mad rarely know that they are mad. It's the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them.”

“Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.”

“I don't know if I ever really get mad in real life. It's what my shrink was saying to me all those years: You need to get mad! I think rage is so ugly. I just think there's a way to be mad and discuss it.”