Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles de Lint

Calling everyone mad is a neat way to seize the high ground while keeping your hands clean. De Lint’s line doesn’t just flirt with the old “tortured artist” myth; it weaponizes it with a wink. “I think you’re all mad” is ostensibly an insult, but the rhythm turns it into fellowship: the speaker is inside the circle, diagnosing a shared condition. Then comes the pivot: “But that’s part and parcel...” A colloquial shrug that pretends the claim is obvious, even inevitable. Madness isn’t a tragedy here; it’s a credential.

The subtext is doing two jobs at once. First, it flatters the artist: if the world feels unhinged, maybe that’s because you’re seeing more than other people can bear to notice. Second, it lets the artist off the hook. If genius requires a little instability, then eccentricity, obsession, even social misfit behavior becomes not just forgivable but necessary. The rhetorical question at the end seals the bargain by recruiting the listener into agreement. You’re not asked to evaluate the premise; you’re nudged to nod along.

Placed in de Lint’s broader terrain - urban fantasy steeped in liminal spaces, outsiders, and alternative ways of knowing - “madness” reads less like pathology and more like permeability. The “genius” isn’t the lone tortured prodigy; it’s the person willing to stay open to weirdness, to art, to the unreal. It’s a defense of sensitivity in a culture that often calls it delusion, delivered with enough self-awareness to admit it’s also a convenient story.