Mary Kay Andrews Quotes

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar.

Emotional life is - alongside work - one of the great challenges of existence and is a theme that I keep returning to.

All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.

I go through major crises every few months, but then I have great peaks of belief and creativity. I'm a weird kind of animal.

Well, I believe that life is very complicated. And in a way, the only way you can show life in a truthful way is to show how complicated it is as an individual, but also your relation between a complicated life and the complications you have inside you.

When I reached my senior year in high school, I fell into a hole that took a couple of decades to get out of.

I had some personal issues to sort out so I couldn't work for a while.

Anybody who's dealt with addiction and depression knows that sometimes they can make you forget who you are and kind of bring out a different person, somebody you don't know as well.

I've had my dark days, but I wasn't really a hell-raiser as such.

I got issues. Boy, have I got issues.

I am really driven, but my drive doesn't effect the conversations I have in my head about life, and my worries and fears and insecurities.

In your twenties, if you have any amount of complexity in your childhood, or any trauma that you haven't dealt with, it comes out. That's why you have a lot of artists that don't make it through.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

We all have to go through our own spiritual process. It is very difficult. Some people are struggling and they are in their teens. Some people are in their 50s and they're struggling. Some people go through life and die not being able to accept themselves. Tragic. But it's very individual. And it's about self-esteem.

I try to write about the stuff that torments us all.

Sometimes you have to confront your demons and sometimes even let them loose to genuinely find a place where you can gain some understanding.

I think a novel has to be about where you are at a given moment in time. I think it really needs to represent some specific pain you're going through. it's not just a story.

I realized that there was something internal that I could gain from pursuing this career as an actor. However, once I got into the business I just really abhorred what this career can drum up inside of a person.

Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.

I have a lot of sympathy for young people because I realize how disturbed I was. How would I deal with life in the future? What would I do for a living?

Almost every month, I have a day where I get stuck in the mud of me. I used to blame hormones and PMS. After I hit 50, I blamed the lack of hormones. But men get stuck, too, so it must simply be the human condition.

I would stay in my room for days, for days at times, just trying to get it together, to know what my next phase was going to be.

Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief.

You know, I've had my ups and downs.