My mother, who was radiant, young, and beautiful even as she lay dying, heard voices and saw visions, but she always managed to make friends with them and was much too charming to hospitalize even at her craziest.

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

There was a point when I was 15 or 16 that I realized that my father wanted me to be a loner. I decided, 'It's okay to be an introvert, but I don't want to be a loner. I want a few other people in my life.

Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.

What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.

We're here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is.

With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously you’re zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.

Colds, ulcers, flu, and cancer are things we get. Schizophrenia is something we are.

Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.

I saw a study the other day showing that some atypical anti-psychotic was at least as good as mood stabilizers in preventing suicide. It's a very good thing to decrease suicide but we should care at least a little if I'm not killing myself because I feel better or if I just can't remember where I put the damn gun.

Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.

I take care of military families. Their sacrifices are very real.

Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.

I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.

And if you're lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, 'How all right can he be?'

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art, you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.