Actors take risks all the time. We put ourselves on the line. It is creative to be able to interpret someone's words and breathe life into them.
For the first time, I lived alone... in a luxury apartment on Sunset Strip. For a few days I loved the idea, but I got lonely and restless.
From the time Sean was born, until I was diagnosed, I was murder to live with. I don't think I was marriage material at all until seven years ago.
Human beings have speculated about the relationship between inspiration and insanity for centuries.
I began running around with what was left of the Rat Pack.
I began to travel to psychiatric hospitals to speak to patients and their families, and I testified at congressional hearings about the need for more funding for mental illness.
I believe that all the important people in my life prior to 1982 were victimized by my illness.
I can't even remember how many times I tried to kill myself.
I can't tell you what I had for breakfast, but I can sing every single word of rock and roll.
I do not recall any manias before I was 19.
I get up every day and think about going to the gym.
I had been very close to Anne Bancroft when we worked together in The Miracle Worker.
I have a picture of myself in my mind as I walk around every day, until I look in the mirror-and then I'm stunned.
I have been afraid all my life that I am going to die. All my life it has been stuffed in my imagination.
I have two books that were published quite some time ago. I start to read about three sentences. I have to close it. I am so self-conscious. Who did I think I was?
I joke around a lot about the manic times because they're funny. We manics do outrageous things and it is part of our colorful nature.
I keep saying to the Hallmark people that I want to play a nun for the rest of my life.
I kind of like the position of being the fair-haired savior of my mother.
I knew from a very young age that there was something very wrong with me.
I know that without treatment I would not have never been able to harness my creativity in such a successful way.
I look at all the writing I did in the '70s, and they are ravings. And they're not even interesting ravings.
I love doing television movies, and I have a lot of other things to fill the days.
I never became involved with other kinds of drugs, grass and cocaine. I never dropped acid. I thought I would lose my mind.
I never did quite fit the glamour mode. It is life with my husband and family that is my high now.
I never went to the supermarket. I lived on deli food. I didn't make any decisions.
I still have highs and lows, just like any other person. What's missing is the lack of control over the super highs, which became destructive, and the super lows, which are immediately destructive.
I tell people to monitor their self-pity. Self-pity is very unattractive.
I think it is necessary to live your life to the best of your new ability.
I think my real depressions started when I was about 16 and doing The Patty Duke Show. I would go to bed at about 10 o'clock on a Friday night and not get up again until 6:30 Monday morning.
I think those doctors must have known what they were doing. I feel, truthfully, a little more tired a little more often than I think I should.
I thought I had to hit a 300 every time. Also, the people who managed my career expected a 300 every time.
I tried very hard to be a docile nun with a sense of humor, but I saw a still photograph of me in one of those scenes and I thought, Oh my God. It's the look. It's the nun look!
I was wandering around the hospitals of Chicago looking for a baby to adopt. I couldn't learn my lines. I was throwing up all the time, and the dogs were all over the Holiday Inn.
I went on a diet. I went from 108 pounds to 73. This was before we knew much about anorexia.
I would have liked to think of myself as freewheeling and not caring what anybody thought, but there was the core of the good Catholic girl who does things by the rules.
I would take a shower and curl my hair and put on some clothes. That might take half a day.
I wouldn't want to do a talk show that just interviews celebrity after celebrity.
I'm going to be 58, and I'm a woman. In this business, that seems to be a bigger crime than being mentally ill.
I'm living out a childhood fantasy. Our house is in a historic district of a small town that I used to read about in storybooks.
I'm not sure I want all my neuroses cleared up.
I've been making a lot of movies lately, and I feel as though my acting has taken on a new dimension.
I've come to believe that whoever I am didn't start on December 14, 1946, and isn't going to end on whatever that mysterious date is in the future.
If I have any message for others, it is to go for help early and not to be a resistant patient.
If you need to eat on time the way I do, make sure you do it. You don't want to be around when I'm hungry and the meal is taking too long to arrive.
If your agent can't reach you on the phone, you can't be called upon to answer if you'll take this next job or not.
It is astonishing what that phrase, heart bypass, can do to the energy in the room.
It is up to people like me who have access to the media and the support of most of the community I live in to spread the word.
It thrills me to talk to someone and see in their eyes that a connection has been made, to see that communion of spirit.
It's been really rejuvenating for me to be in business with the Hallmark channel.
It's hard to imagine that you're mad at your mother, that you hate your mother. To me that's not a noble way to feel.
It's important to me not to present a picture of perfection.
It's my turn to go out and clean the yard. It's worse than changing diapers. I pick up pine cones instead.
It's toughest to forgive ourselves. So it's probably best to start with other people. It's almost like peeling an onion. Layer by layer, forgiving others, you really do get to the point where you can forgive yourself.
My recovery from manic depression has been an evolution, not a sudden miracle.
No matter what your laundry list of requirements in choosing a mate, there has to be an element of good luck and good fortune and good timing.
Now I am willing to make a few mistakes. Not a lot, just a few.
One of my jobs that I think is almost God-given is my ability to communicate, and I must use that to reach out to people who are in a position that they think is hopeless.
Our lives weren't always in chaos. After an episode, I would apologize to John and to the kids and try to explain myself. But you just never knew when the good time would be over.
Reality is hard. It is no walk in the park, this thing called Life.
Sign Language is so expressive. It uses body movement.
Sometimes I go from city to city to physically show people that it's possible to live a balanced life. Sometimes it's writing, and sometimes it's television interviews.
Sometimes it is the simplest, seemingly most inane, most practical stuff that matters the most to someone.
Sometimes, as people told their stories, their pain was so rampant I thought I would just die listening to their agony.
The doctors must tell you that one of the risks of surgery is that you might die. This poor doctor was talking to an actress. It was very dramatic to me. To him, it was just a thing he had to say.
The Eleanor Roosevelt Award that I received for women's rights activities is one I treasure.
The mania started with insomnia and not eating and being driven, driven to find an apartment, driven to see everybody, driven to do New York, driven to never shut up.
The panic attacks - I still have them. They started when I was around 8. They always have to do with my death.
The rate of growth in my mind and my heart in the last seven years is beyond measuring.
The series had been canceled, so I was not earning money and therefore I was useless.
The things that made the happiest and most comfortable had very little to do with a big city and glamour.
There are enough people out there who still equate mental illness with damaged goods that can't be fixed.
There is a pull that won't let me get too far away from acting.
There must have been a time in the world when there was no music. I sure can't imagine it. It's so important, even in my work.
This very loquacious woman that I am now didn't exist then. I could not explain what I was feeling.
We have developed this unbelievable ability to deny. We have to. If we didn't, we'd go crazy.
What did I want? Some billionaire? Someone brilliant to fiddle with my brain?
When I don't know what the music is going to be for a scene, I imagine some sort of orchestration going on and damned if they don't usually come up with a similar kind of thing.
When I'm 80 and sitting in a rocking chair listening to the Rolling Stones, there is absolutely no way I'm going to feel old or forget my younger days.
When the mania starts to ebb and you return to the planet, you begin to recognize that you have done some very strange things.
Who knew then that certain drugs, such as those contained in anesthetics, could be bad for me?
Women who put on a few pounds after starting lithium sometimes say the cure is worse than the disease. The weight gain shoots them straight into depression.
You can have manic-depression without having an ounce of creativity.
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