“As you will find in multivariable calculus, there is often a number of solutions for any given problem.”

It’s better to be dead, or even perfectly well, than to suffer from the wrong affliction.

I later spent… five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release.

I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.

In a dream it’s typical not to be rational.

I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house.

Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos.

I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton.

I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health.

I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia.

I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life.

To some extent, people who are insane are nonconformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives.

However I am still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation my situation may be atypical.

There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.

Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.

Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation.

Though I had success in my research both when I was mad and when I was not, eventually I felt that my work would be better respected if I thought and acted like a ‘normal’ person.

The true Logic for this world is the Calculus of Probabilities, which takes account of the magnitude of the probability.

Aerodynamics is mathematics for those who haven’t learned to do calculus. In my case, too, for one who hasn’t learned to add or multiply, at least the first time.