“People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better. In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.”
As quoted in " A Brilliant Madness A Beautiful Madness http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/nash/ (2002), PBS TV program; also cited in Doing Psychiatry Wrong: A Critical and Prescriptive Look at a Faltering Profession (2013) by René J. Muller, p. 62
2000s
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
John Nash 23
American mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate 1928–2015Related quotes

Page 282 of An Anthropologist On Mars By Oliver Sacks
“Madness is always a wonderful excuse, don’t you think? For doing terrible things to other people.”
Source: The Winter People

Conversation of 1947 or 1948
Personal Recollections (1981)

Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, Andre Breton (Manifesto of Surrealism; 1924)

New Scientist interview (2004)

Strange Horizons interview (2004)
Context: I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They fall somewhere on the spectrum of being bipolar, of being borderline autistic and so on. These things are there. Now of course these days you can go to college and when you come out you are a professional artist and you can run a gallery as a business and have a career. That is a very valid way for an artist to make a living. But it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that. The scenes in my book that people describe as "such a hallucinatory sequence" … I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot.
So what am I going to do about that? Am I going to go crazy? Am I going to institutionalize myself? Am I going to go and work in a cubicle as a telemarketer so that I don't give vent to that? Or am I going to take that and channel it into my work? It is a gift.