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“Insanity is a very lonely and empty existence - it’s painfully true. They may laugh and smile, and skip and dance, but behind all the faces there is hollowness like a bottomless pit. The living dead, depression is a terrible illness, so is psychosis, the mentally inflicted beyond cure.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Nowadays I just don’t care; I’ve taken the Frank Zappa stance. I am who I am! Some love me, some loathe me, some respect me and some despise me. But after all that’s been, I still love the insane! As they’re exciting, dangerous and highly explosive! For me mad dogs are gentlemen.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“It’s almost as if Bronson, Ginsberg and Bowie craved the freedom of letting go, of pushing their mind aside and allowing the vampires and demons and all the other freaks to run them so that they could slip away elsewhere”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Fuck the rabbit, eat it and go after a lion.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Sometimes I stare into a pool of piss, I see my reflection, I picture a hole in my face, there’s nothing there, it’s vanished. I watch the maggots turn to flies, and they fly off with bits of flesh from my body. I attempt to wipe it clear from my mind, but the nice thoughts get swallowed up. I can’t think nice for too long…it would destroy me.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“I personally could never come to terms with my label of ‘Criminally Insaneâ€�. Just because of my violent outbursts in prison, don’t mean to say I’m mad. Obviously I had become a disruptive element within the penal system. Uncontrollable! Unpredictable! But that don’t make insanity!”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Some of the madmen are really fun to be with. I soon learnt to relate to them. I soon became one of them. I ended up the maddest of the mad. There is no madder than myself! Please believe it.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“One lunatic in Rampton used to have bouts of hysteria. Where he would let out a scream, and run at a wall and dive headfirst…crash! He was given a crash helmet! (Well it is a mad house.)”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“A loon thought he was Frank Sinatra and every time Frank came on TV or radio the loon would go mad, impostor!”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“So what causes men to become violent? I’ll tell you, boredom, silly rules, muggy screws and pathetic governors. What else can we do - swallow it, wipe our mouths out. You have to fight for your rights. Not sit back and take it.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Violence leads to madness, it fills you with crazy thoughts. You sleep it, eat it and shit it. You become a time bomb. They push you a bit more â€� you blow up. They beat you and you survive. You get strong and you blow again. So how long can a man live this way? I’ll tell you…until he dies, if need be. It becomes a way of life, but I don’t remember it, why? Simple…it’s painful; it’s empty and alone. Your cell becomes a hole in the earth, it sucks you in. You drown in your own bitterness, it’s not right to live this way.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Prison madness is much the same! Insanity is plentiful in prisons. These days with the drug culture it’s not a lot of difference, as a lot of convicts make themselves psychotic and paranoid. Many end up killers, all over petty and minor problems. Where men would once squabble, fight and kill over a ½ oz of bacca they now do the same over a gram of white powder or a bag of brown!”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Urges like the loony who enjoys strangling, it’s his buzz. He gets depressed when in seclusion, as he can’t strangle anybody so in the end he hangs himself in turmoil. Their brain can’t handle it. He wants so bad to kill, but they will not let him, so he has to kill himself.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“There is no end. There is no cure. It gets worse with time. Cure. How can you cure an institution, we are bricks crumbling in the walls of despair. Death is inevitable for us all. But the insanity is here to stay.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Suicides - you read of it…but you don’t know the truth, if you were to see it you would go insane! Cut throats, cut wrists, hangings, suffocating, eyes bulging and tongues protruding, more shit. Suicides always shit themselves, did you know that! Life’s final shit, the final act of madness; smell that you rats! Clean me up you pigs, zip me up in the bag you scum and get me out of hereâ€� Get me the fuck out of here…get me out!”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“The asylum years taught me a lot about myself. Bear in mind I’m the only lunatic in the United Kingdom who spent time in all three max secure asylums, which you should now know are…Rampton, Broadmoor and Ashworth. Don’t ask me which is the best or the worst, as how do you compare insanity with insanity?”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Broadmoor creeps into your blood, the walls touch the sky and the grounds suck you in, they’ve even got their own burial ground. We called it the ‘madman’s holeâ€�, it smelt of fear; a stillness and even the birds seemed to have a stone face like their eyes were made of marble. So many monsters, men of hell, I don’t know how a sane man can keep sane in there.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Asylums are crazy places, with crazy rules. If you’re not mad when you arrive, you are when you leave. (That’s if you ever leave.) I was lucky…I got slung out; they couldn’t afford to keep me any longer.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“I went through a period where I couldn’t keep off the establishment’s roofs, it was a serious urge I had. To look at a drainpipe and start shaking with excitement, nobody knows the feeling of hitting a prison roof, not unless you’ve done it. Let me tell you, it’s like a lotto win - it’s power. You’re the governor; it’s a kick in the teeth to the system.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Madness is forever! We even smell different, our hearts don’t beat, they tick, our eyes are different, we don’t just see, we also pick up vibes. We are probably dehumanised and way past our ‘sell byâ€� date, totally unusable, bitter as lemons.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“He got a lovely pair of trainers given off his mum for Christmas, best pair he ever had, but it was the nylon laces that he couldn’t take his eyes off. They found him hanging in his cell!”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“She sat in a secluded room, she was mad, but she could not accept it; so she was neither sane nor insane. She could not be either until she knew herself, so in limbo she must die. She kept stuffing toilet roll into her mouth. They found her choked to death!”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“He was a silent type, very nervy of people: shy, introverted, nobody would believe he could scream so loud…well he did drink a bottle of bleach!”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“I am a creation of the establishment, I realise I’m not as strong as life itself, but I also realise death will suck me in. The eyes and fingers are pointing in my direction. For me, there is only one way â€� one road, one signpost; it reads, ‘Hellâ€�. It’s a one-way ticket; there are no brakes on my vehicle, there is no way out, only one way in.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Unlike most I don’t fear prison, never have, never will. Obviously I don’t want it, I hate it, but it’s the hate that drives me on to survive.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“A madman overcomes it by adapting to his surroundings. You can’t give up. Why die? There is always another mission; it’s the missions that keep you alive.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Take outside - freedom. What is it? What does it mean to a madman? I’ll tell you, we go years through a lifetime with no love, no sex, no nice food and no nice clothes. So when it comes…we choke on it! The kindness strangles us; we can’t cope, so we make pigs of ourselves.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“Madness is a bowl of poison cherries, chew them and die, but you die screaming in agony.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“A doctor once asked me: 'Charlie, what do you think your problem is?' “Doc,' I said, '…you’re the problem!”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life

“You get used to the brain being squeezed. At nighttime in the darkness of your emptiness, it seems to swell back up and gives you some peace. In the darkness even the pain is not so bad. A bruise heals. (Time is the treatment.) But it’s your mind that’s tortured. Your thoughts are in turmoil and despair. Feelings of awesome revenge and destruction manifest themselves.”
― Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life