I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently.

Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses.

The schizophrenic mind is not so much split as shattered. I like to say schizophrenia is like a waking nightmare.

No one would ever say that someone with a broken arm or a broken leg is less than a whole person, but people say that or imply that all the time about people with mental illness

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

Some people still hold [the] view that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed.

Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.

Please hear this: There are not ‘schizophrenics,’ there are people with schizophrenia.

My mind has been both my best friend and my worst enemy.

Everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own ways.

Choose your friends wisely, and also choose friends that you can trust.

You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche.

The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.

The way that these girls keep themselves skinny is awful, isn't it? By vomiting or using hard drugs - which I can't afford.

Genuine contempt, on the other hand, is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another.

There ought to be gardens for all months in the year, in which, severally, things of beauty may be then in season.

There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned.

Being a public figure was reserved for movie stars.

I rode Sea Pigeon in all his work - that's why my arms are so long.

The evil that machinery is doing is not merely in the consequence of its work but in the fact that it makes men themselves machines also.