"Insults wound me so deeply they disarm me, they force me to the ground, and I am sure that they will one day destroy me...If not, everything I've read and seen myself has deceived me, then a great part of what is taken for madness is really hyper-sensitiveness. It has often been maliciously hinted and even openly declared that I am a fool. Maybe I am, but I doubt it....A real madman is, as a rule, the only person who doesn't recognise his madness...If I were a poet, I might be able to reap praise by putting these things to verse. But the talent of expression was not given to me, and so I must bear being laughed at, scorned at, and slandered. I am called a fool."