Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent

I'd really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated.

You don't even have to hate to have a perfectly miserable time.

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.

That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.

It doesn’t matter how many years go by, how much therapy I embark on, how much I try to achieve that elusive thing known as perspective, which is supposed to put all past wrongs into their rightful and diminished place, that happy place where all the talk is of lessons learned and inner peace. No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them. They are front and center, they are going on right now.

Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.