Maynard James Keenan Quotes

I had a nervous breakdown at 17 when my first love left me, and he was a typical bad boy, albeit a charismatic one, with a string of broken hearts trailing behind him.

I feel like a lot of comedians do have that deep, dark thing. I have my stuff, but I don't go to that dark place.

I have my own demons and dark moods. It's weird.

When I repress my emotion my stomach keeps score.

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on a stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.

Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.

There have been times in my life that I've had a ton of vices, and my demons have run amok for years and years and years.

I'm not a proponent of staying together and being miserable and damaged and coming through actually a more battered person.

I'm very interested in dysfunction. I kind of realized in my first film that a character with so much rage that she didn't know where to put it was both heartbreaking and interesting to me.

Hatred is nothing but a form of cancer, and it will eat you up.

What's often not acknowledged about depression is how much anger is in it.

There are such wonderful blessings in my life - I have this amazing baby, an amazing family, and I loved X Factor - all these moments of joy, and then these sharp drop-offs. I'd be awake, lying in bed, crying. There's these weird moments of misplaced anger I have.

Insanity's so personal. It's hard to know who shares our secrets.

Love: a grave mental disease.

Worry is fear in disguise. And fear will eat you from the inside out if you let it.

At the best of times, spring hurts depressives.

It's part of what we call the Shadow, all the dark parts of us we can't face. It's the thing that, if we don't deal with it, eventually poisons our lives.

Things you believe are baggage in your life.

An unacknowledged trauma is like a wound that never heals over and may start to bleed again at any time.

As important as politics are to me, the life and the spirit of people's emotions are much more important. People live real lives where they love and grieve and feel pain and joy and that is a whole separate sphere. All that political stuff, I believe in it strongly, but not as strongly as I believe that at some point you or someone is going to need a song to sit with and comfort them in a hard time.

hate isn't healthy, it damages the hater more than the one who's hated!

Keep dating and you will become so sick, so badly crippled, so deformed, so emotionally warped and mentally defective that you will marry anybody.

I'm afraid of the skeletons in my closet. I've got a whole cemetery full of them.

I’ve known a lot of people go mad over the years, and it is more distressing than people dying. People dying is quite natural, people going mad is the complete antithesis of that.