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.

As well as being one of the worst things that can happen to a human being, schizophrenia can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers.

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.

Are people who have been crazy held to unfair standards?Of course, but it's not in your best interest to complain. If you're paranoid and people are looking at you funny it's best to let it pass. Psychotic people have an uncanny knack for making their own worst dreams come true. Depressing things happen to depressed people way beyond what you would expect from random distribution.

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

Note to self: being Kurt's son, being an ex-mental patient, getting into Harvard, having written a book, and being a doctor are all things that in and of themselves do not make a life. If you lean on them too hard, you'll find that there's not much there. But if you add up a lot of things that aren't in and of themselves enough, it almost starts to add up to something.

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.