I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that it was my task to swallow fifty asprin.It was my task:my job for the day.-17 Girl Interrupted

Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.

The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.

Every window in Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor.

I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.

I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.

My chronic feelings of emptiness and boredom came from the fact that I was living a life based on my incapacities, which were numerous.

Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone.

An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled or because inner life is transfixingly busy.

As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn't have.

The casting couch? There's only one of us who ever made it to stardom without it, and that was Bette Davis.

Money can be a very important form of "ammunition," although we should never forget that when you're being shot at the most important ammunition is real ammunition.

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

If a task is worthy of our attention, it is worthy of our best.

Get low; grace will meet you there.

There's nothing political about American literature.

I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars.

I didn't entertain the idea that my music would ever become available in any of the ways that I had previously known music to be available.

I did not come all this way not to interfere