Henry Rollins Quotes

I'm not going to lie. I am a psycho. Luckily, I get most of it out on stage.

The truth is I was suffering from bipolar disorder. It went on for 18 months, during which I changed four doctors, the medication wasn't working on me, and crazy things were happening.

Van Gogh was impulsive.

I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital.

I haven't gone completely insane, but it might happen soon.

I think that every young person is a little mentally ill, you know? If we're not totally shutting down, we're all a little bit mentally ill in our twenties and maybe into our early thirties.

Art is a liaison between some sort of deranged mentality and others who are not going through it.

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.

If I hadn't had acting, I would probably have imploded.

I don't know any artists that are really emotionally well adjusted. In fact, I think we're all pretty much insane.

Most comedians are borderline psychotic. It's what makes their work interesting.

I was doing general medicine and during residency, I moonlighted at a psychiatric hospital and became very interested in the medical care of psychiatric patients.

If creative work protects a man against mental illness, it is small wonder that he pursues it with avidity; and even if the state of mind he is seeking to avoid is no more than a mild state of depression or apathy, this still constitutes a cogent reason for engaging in creative work even when it brings no obvious external benefit in its train.

I am crazy as hell, but I know it. And knowing it is a kind of sanity that makes the sickness worse.

Supposedly there's an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I've seen it with my own eyes.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.

And when no hope was left inside on that starry, starry night, you took your life as lovers often do. But I could have told you, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

Yes I try to kill myself in small amounts, an innocuous occupation. Actually I'm hung up on it.

I think my first bout of that was when I was doing me and My Girl, funnily enough. I really didn't change my clothes or answer the phone, but went into the theatre every night and was cheerful and sang the Lambeth Walk. She said: “The only thing I could do was write. I used to crawl from the bedroom to the computer and just sit and write, and then I was alright, because I was not present. “Sense and Sensibility really saved me from going under, I think, in a very nasty way.

You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.

For years my life alternated between depression and acute anxiety. One night I woke up in a state of dread and intense fear, more intense than I had ever experienced before. Life seemed meaningless, barren, hostile. It became so unbearable that suddenly the thought came into my mind, I cannot live with myself any longer.

I'm a pretty psycho-obsessed shrink.

I was telling some people in my dressing room some of my other stories, my psychotic break, and blah, blah, blah, and no, they kind of look at you and it's just not what they wanted to hear.