Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.

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

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.

My only hope was to be polite.

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.

I don't think the people today who start hearing voices, stop eating and sleeping, and run amuck are likely to get good treatment. Having more knowledge, better diagnostic capabilities, better medications with fewer side effects, can't make up for the fact that most patients are being treated by doctors, therapists, and hospitals, who are operating under constraints and incentives that reward non-treatment, non-hospitalization, non-therapy, non-follow-up, non-care. Lost to follow-up is the best outcome a health insurer can hope for.

Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?