Patty Duke Quotes

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

There's a fine line between genius and insanity, as we all know.

A possible link between 'madness' and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions.

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.

Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.

What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the air, there's no rational process.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

Art is a kind of illness.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

Writers ... I think ... live on that fine line between insanity and genius.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

Of course creativity is a mystery. We don't know what drives it or what constitutes it. It's one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it's impossible to define.

The man is either mad, or he is making verses.

Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.

England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

A neurotic can perfectly well be a literary genius, but his greatest danger is always that he will not recognize when he is dull.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.