Dana Spiotta Quotes

Schizophrenia is hearing voices, not doing voices.

Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.

What view is one likely to take of the state of a person's mind when his speech is wild and incoherent and knows no constraint?

My experience is that when one is in psychosis, you're on a mission and nothing is going to stop you. At some level your brain is telling you you probably shouldn't be doing this, but you're on a mission.

The schizophrenic mind is not so much split as shattered. I like to say schizophrenia is like a waking nightmare.

What a mysterious thing madness is. I have watched patients whose lips are forever sealed in a perpetual silence. They live, breathe, eat; the human form is there, but that something, which the body can live without, but which cannot exist without the body, was missing.

The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are.

After a century of studying schizophrenia, the cause of the disorder remains unknown.

I'm not a nutcase. I know that.

When a man lacks mental balance in pneumonia he is said to be delirious. When he lacks mental balance without the pneumonia, he is pronounced insane by all smart doctors.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

The United States is a madhouse.

I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.

The thing about delirium is you think it's great, but it actually isn't.

I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.

Consciousness is a disease.

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.

In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases they're not.

... the work of lunatics.

...it must be clearly proved that, at the time of committing the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing was wrong; or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.

To do that job you need to be mentally disturbed.

… an illiterate with an unbalanced mind.

There's something messed up with my brain.