Joe Orton Quotes

That's the terrible part. I swear to God I'm a madman.

I felt passing over me the wind of the wing of madness.

Raving mad is quite easy. You just chew up the scenery or something. It's quiet mad that's hard.

Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness... It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.

Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.

Most of the world was mad. And the part that wasn't mad was angry. And the part that wasn't mad or angry was just stupid. I had no chance. I had no choice. Just hang on and wait for the end. It was hard work. It was the hardest work imaginable.

I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it.

I've been outta my mind a long time.

We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!

In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of "spiritual" feelings and "critical" discontent, is insanity.

He's hell bent for destruction, he's afraid and confused, and his brain has been mismanaged with great skill.

There is no difference between acute schizophrenia and a world at war.

True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had haunted my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Of all the sense of hearing acute.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars....But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable....It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty.

I have a plan-to go mad.

People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it.

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

We all go a little mad sometimes.

I think everybody's nuts.

I've been insane from a very early age.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.