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The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. (Marcus Aurelius)
I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow. (Nicholson Baker)
I have spent a lot of years on the outside looking in. (Joseph Barbera)
I do dumb stuff, like playing my favorite dumb Barry White song and lip-synching into the mirror so it looks like his voice is coming out of my mouth. (Lynda Barry)
To be really great and interesting, you have to be a little crazy. I just don't think one comes without the other. (Drew Barrymore)
We are all born mad. Some remain so. (Samuel Beckett)
I have a lot of tics and phobias. I hate to travel. I hate to go to festivals. I hate it when somebody gets close behind me. I'm scared of the darkness. I hate open doors. (Ingmar Bergman)
I can't imagine trying to be normal. I gave up on that a long time ago, when I finally woke up to the fact that trying to be 'normal' seemed to cause endless misery. Don't be afraid to dream, to imagine, to toy with the idea of creating something delicious in your life. (Susan Biali, M.D.)
mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane. (Ambrose Bierce)
eccentricity, n. A method of distinction so cheap that fools employ it to accentuate their incapacity. (Ambrose Bierce)
Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality. (Elizabeth Bowen)
I find only freedom in the realms of eccentricity... (David Bowie)
I was one of Them: the Strange Ones. The Funny People. The Odd Tribes of autograph collectors and photographers. The Ones who waited through long days and nights, who used other people's dreams for their lives. (Ray Bradbury)
I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off. (Ray Bradbury)
Wear audacious underwear under the most solemn business attire. (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)
People are broad-minded. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there's something wrong with him. (Art Buchwald)
Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. (Charles Bukowski)
The world thinks eccentricity in great things is genius, but in small things, only crazy. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
When I was young I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my fifties I was considered eccentric. Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then and I'm labeled senile. (George Burns)
I am getting so far out one day I won't come back at all. (William S. Burroughs)
It seems that one has to be sick, depressed, weird or tortured to be thought of as an outstanding artist. (LeslieAnn Butler)
It's important to keep the eccentric spirit alive, because when that goes, the work will go. (Nicolas Cage)
Madness is never that far away. It's as close as saying yes to the wrong impulse. (Jim Carrey)
Only the other day I was inquiring of an entire bed of old-fashioned roses, forced to listen to my ramblings on the meaning of the universe as I sat cross-legged in the lotus position in front of them. (Prince Charles)
I can do anything I want, I'm eccentric! (John Cleese)
I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position. (Pat Conroy)
The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert...
The course of water over the earth is circular coming down from the sky and circulating through the world to spread life and then evaporating up again. I live in a circular teepee and build my fire in a circle. The life cycles of plants and animals are circular. I live outside where I can see this. (Eustace Conway)
I tried fitting in, but I came to realize that I was truly different. My isolation has helped to foster my creativity. Generally, I enjoy being outside the loop. I get a bird's eye view of what's happening, and when I do choose to opt back in, it's on my terms. (Sharon Cory)
You pretend to be more eccentric than you actually are because you fear you are an interchangeable cog. (Doug Coupland)
Two things, life style and work, have become one. Now if that's eccentricity, then I'm eccentric. (Mason Currey)
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. (Philip K. Dick)
- b.412 BC d.323 BC...
It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours. (Diogenes)
There is a pleasure in being mad which none but madmen know. (John Dryden)
For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity. (Jean Dubuffet)
When one lives among madmen, one should train as a maniac. (Alexandre Dumas)
When I was young I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks. (Albert Einstein)
For some are sane and some are mad / And some are good and some are bad / And some are better, some are worse - / But all may be described in verse. (T. S. Eliot)
I'm very sane about how crazy I am. (Carrie Fisher)
Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought. (Erich Fromm)
My eccentricity became direction. (Jean Paul Gaultier)
My most creative mode occurs in the bathtub. I'm a horizontal thinker. (Marty Gibson)
Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. (Allen Ginsberg)
What am I in most people's eyes? A nonentity or an eccentric and disagreeable man... I should want my work to show what is in the heart of such an eccentric, of such a nobody. (Vincent van Gogh)
I am eccentric, I admit it, but I am not a nutcase. (Zaha Hadid)
- The Day I Became an Autodidact...
I sometimes think if I did not write I would be a madwoman. Now I am a sane woman with a lot of mad pages. (Kendall Hailey)
Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend. (Jim Harrison)
-said while making Fitzcarraldo...
I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum. (Werner Herzog)
When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane. (Hermann Hesse)
We often take for granted the notion that some people are insiders, while others are outsiders. But such a notion is a social contrivance, that, like virtually every public construct, is a legacy of a primordial and tribal mentality. (Jamake Highwater)
Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently - they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do. (Steve Jobs)
A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free. (Nikos Kazantzakis)
Nevertheless we understood each other on all levels of madness... (Jack Kerouac)
People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people. (Charles F. Kettering)
I didn't want to even stand next to any high rise building as long as I lived... I didn't even want to go over a bridge. (Stephen King)
I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland. (Yayoi Kusama)
They must have thought it was strange that you'd live in a housing project, if you had enough money to give away art to museums. I guess they thought I was eccentric. (Mark A. Landis)
- A Jest of God...
I may become, in time, slightly more eccentric all the time. (Margaret Laurence)
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? (Ursula K. LeGuin)
I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don't apply to those who live on the fringe. (Tamara de Lempicka)
I always was a rebel... but on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted... and not just be a loudmouth, lunatic, poet, musician. But I cannot be what I am not. (John Lennon)
Yes, you know sometimes, we started out thinking how strange our painting was next to normal painting, which was anything expressionist. You forget that this has been thirty-five years now and people don't look at it as if it were some kind of oddity. (Roy Lichtenstein)
I'm hostile to men, I'm hostile to women, I'm hostile to cats, to poor cockroaches, I'm afraid of horses. (Norman Mailer)
The artist's task is to become a successful eccentric, a strange but wise duck able to venture out of solitary confinement and mingle among society. (Eric Maisel)
Being crazy... Strange... Hopeful... Is amazing in silence. (Ashgan Makarem)
The artist must somehow learn to function creatively without losing a social base. Yet much of the finest talent on the planet was not considered sane, for example Van Gogh... (H Margret)
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive. (Yann Martel)
I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird. (Paul McCartney)
- Boy's Life...
Maybe he was crazy. Maybe crazy is what they call anybody who's got magic in them after they're no longer a child. (Robert R. McGammon)
When I would make a figure that was so distorted it was hardly like a figure, I got a maniacal impulse to write 'figure' in a couple of paintings. I did some writing in the paintings. And then I saw the graffiti...It does give me a certain kind of whimsy... (George McNeil)
I dare affirm that any artist... who has nothing singular, eccentric, or at least reputed to be so, in his person, will never become a superior talent. (Michelangelo)
Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. (John Stuart Mill)
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane. (Henry Miller)
- Epicurean Simplicity...
It's far too easy to qualify as an eccentric nowadays. (Stephanie Mills)
I was so upset yesterday that I made the blunder of throwing myself in the water. Fortunately, there were no bad results. (Claude Monet)
Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy. (Thelonius Monk)
Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. (Marilyn Monroe)
All pioneers are considered to be afflicted with moonstruck madness. (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
'Normal' is a dryer setting. (Elizabeth Moon)
Where's your will to be weird? (Jim Morrison)
Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream. (Malcolm Muggeridge)
Society doesn't need that everybody is behaving in the full normal way... like people in a Buddhist monastery... But eccentricity may also connect with the irrational. (John Muir)
People like eccentrics. Therefore they will leave me alone, saying that I am a 'mad clown'. (Vaslav Nijinsky)
Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world. (Kathleen Norris)
Develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga. (David Ogilvy)
There's something about being in the country that makes you stick out like a sore thumb – you're an anomaly. But in London there's always someone wilder and woollier. (Cornelia Parker)
Without madness what is man / more than the healthy beast, / corpse adjourned that procreates? (Fernando Pessoa)
Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. (Edgar Allan Poe)
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them. (Ezra Pound)
Apart from the occasional severed ear or descent into fecal-eating dementia, the creative impulse is mostly little more than a quaint eccentricity. But introduce this mostly benign neurosis into a commercial context... well that way my friends lies misery and madness. (Linds Redding)
There are essential and inessential insanities... Inessential insanities get one in trouble with oneself. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. It's always preferable to be in trouble with others. In fact, it may be essential. (Tom Robbins)
-on Tom Thomson...
We saw Tom come almost at a run over the Joe Lake Portage. Canoe over his head. Throwing his canoe into the water he seized his paddle like a mad man to our wharf - here he pulled up his canoe in haste and up into our cabin. (Mark Robinson)
The difference between a crazy person and the successful entrepreneur is that the latter can convince others to share the vision. (Anita Roddick)
What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? (Theodore Roethke)
- b.1207 d.1273...
Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy, absent-minded. Someone sober will worry about events going badly. Let the lover be. (Rumi)
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. (Bertrand Russell)
Let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all. (Charles Saatchi)
The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that. (Arnold Schwarzenegger)
Eccentricity may be merely the warping of conventional thought, like wearing a tuxedo to breakfast. (Ian Semple)
Why fit in when you were born to stand out? (Dr. Seuss)
We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love. (Dr. Seuss)
The man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd. (Edith Sitwell)
I'm nuts and I know it. But so long as I make 'em laugh, they ain't going to lock me up. (Red Skelton)
I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface. (Stephen Sondheim)
The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate. (Wallace Stevens)
Normal people do not create art. (Irving Stone)
I've always been kind of an escape artist. I thought the day-to-day reality of things was unbearably flat. (Sharon Stone)
I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place. (Anthony Storr)
The sane are madder than we think; the mad saner. (Anthony Storr)
Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. (Hunter S. Thompson)
-to Mark Robinson...
Say Mark... you know just what I want, three trees... Black spruce rough cold looking trees you know what I mean. Trees against a cold green grey northern sky - where can I get them at once? (Tom Thomson)
Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness. (Guillermo del Toro)
Be virtuous and you will be eccentric. (Mark Twain)
Excellent day for putting Slinkies on an escalator. (Author unknown)
Well what's wrong with that? There's a woman three doors down talks to her microwave. Talking to a microwave! Wall, what's the world coming to? (Shirley Valentine)
A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key. (Paul Valery)
I hope I'm becoming more eccentric. More room in the brain. (Tom Waits)
Be nobody's darling; / Be an outcast. / Take the contradictions / Of your life / And wrap around / You like a shawl, / To parry stones / To keep you warm. (Alice Walker)
Eccentricity comes from the mind and a playfulness about life and language, manifesting itself in real individualistic character. (Coulter Watt)
Creativity is at the heart of eccentricity. (David Weeks)
Eccentric people have these happy obsessive preoccupations, and a wonderful, unusual sense of humor, and this gives them a significant meaning in life. And they are far healthier than most people because of that. (David Weeks)
I was intrigued and enormously drawn to extremism by people who had blown their lives or who had taken their lives outside the normal conventions of society. (Brett Whiteley)
You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it. (Robin Williams)
Sometimes people say I should see a therapist, but I don't want any therapist wrecking my weirdness. (Peter Wolf)
Being different, being against the grain of society, is the greatest thing in the world. (Elijah Wood)
- La Bete Humaine...
Don't go looking at me like that because you'll wear your eyes out. (Emile Zola)
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