When a society is stressed, when it comes up against things that are hard to understand, you get a lot of delusional thinking.

Things go bad after a divorce and often stay that way. It is rare for the parties to return placidly to a time before they met. A bitterness lingers on. Those who call this our Independence Day, fantasising of returning to a never-never time before they married, when they were free, easy, single, and master of their fate, are delusional.

Men are taught that if we are not the ultimate provider, we are a complete failure. We have to be number one in everything we do. There is nothing more delusional or paralysing than what I have just described.

My mother had two unshakable beliefs that she tried to drill into me. The first was that I had to study and work twice as hard as my white peers if I wanted to survive in America, and the second was that it was delusional and dangerous to believe I possessed the same freedom white people had to pursue my dreams.

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn't expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.

Truth and justice are commonly found in the personality of the paranoid delusional

I was also built from delusional optimism and folly.

Maybe I'm delusional but I'm usually funny. It's not 100% but I have a pretty good batting average.