I know that if I were mad, after several days of confinement, I should take advantage of any lapses in my madness to murder anyone, preferably a doctor, who came near me. At least this would permit me, like the violent, to be confined to solitary. Perhaps they’d leave me alone.

From André Breton’s Nadja, Harmondsworth: Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1999 (first published in 1928), p. 141.