"Strindberg illustrates also the consoling power of art. The one thing that over long periods of his later life could give him a kind of calm, even a kind of happiness, was his power to create. So he has himself recorded. And indeed without this imaginative outlet he might well have ended in a madhouse."- F.L. Lucas
"So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking) has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them. The ground of the mistake is, that men finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but has dominion over it."-Charles Lamb, in his essay 'Sanity of True Genius'
"A mad genius, paranoid and Oedipal, is driven by some compulsion to set down the experiences he believes he has had-such is the usual view of the Defence. It seems an extraordinarily naive view that ignores the evidence offered by Strindberg's letters and takes no account of his avowed principles as an artist. A far more sensible view is that Strindberg created his experiences in order to write about them. Interested in exploring the frontier where jealousy encroaches on madness, he set up a model of the terrain in his own home. That is the scientific method. It is also a method not unfamiliar to actors."-Sprinchorn, in his introduction to A Madman's Defence.
