“I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.”

“The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here I am,” but to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here YOU are.”

“I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am.”

“Even now I cannot believe that I am still alive and writing this account of the emperor's death. I put my hands to my eyes, wondering if what I am relating here is not all a dream - or maybe it is not a dream: perhaps it is a delusion and I am mad, the victim of some extraordinary and monstrous hallucination. How comes it that when he is dead I am still numbered among the living?”

“I am mad at you, Holder,” I say with an unsteady, but sure voice. “But no matter how mad I’ve been, I never for one second stopped wanting you here with me.”

“I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this.”