David Henry Hwang Quotes

People fear their hidden selves, afraid that they will burst out.

I am always fascinated by the mental struggles that people and characters have.

There is a dark side of me - it's the side people don't really get to see. I think everyone has that.

I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don't know why I do things.

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

The things that make you most mad about the world tend to be the things that you hate in yourself.

Humiliation is a vast country of imprecise boundaries. If you think you're there, you are. The neurotic rule: when in doubt, go ahead and feel humiliated.

Gradually, by processing emotion and understanding the psychological action involved, you realize it isn't really complex. It may seem so at first, but that's because you still belong to your emotions and opinions--you think they're yours and that they're real. They aren't--they belong to the ego. The Infinite Self cannot be insecure.

I hid my deepest feelings so well I forgot where I placed them.

Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.

Maybe it's true what Thomas Moore said: “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.

When some passion or effect is described in a natural style, we find within ourselves the truth of what we hear, without knowing it was there.

The more neurosis the more wisdom.

--Why are we fighting them? --They're mad. We're sane. --How do we know? --That we're sane? --Yes. --Am I sane? --To all appearances. --And you, do you consider yourself sane? --I do. --Well, there you have it. --But don't they also consider themselves sane? --I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane. --How must that make them feel? --Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.

I seek strength, not to be greater than other, but to fight my greatest enemy, the doubts within myself

Everyone fears and courts his own demon.

All mankind's inner feelings eventually manifest themselves as an outer reality.

The worst things weren't outside of you.

The seen and seeing softly mutually strike Their glass barrier that arrests the sight. But the world's being hides in the volcanoes And the foul history pressed into its core; And to myself my being is my childhood And passion and entrails and the roots of senses; I'm pressed into the inside of a mask At the back of love, the back of air, the back of light.

Everyone carries around his own monsters.---Richard Pryor

A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.

Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again… I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O’Neill were laughing.

It was strange how your brain could know what your heart refused to accept.

They often say woman cannot keep a secret, but every woman in the world, like every man, has a hundred secrets in her own soul which she hides from even herself. The more respectable she is, the more certain it is the secrets exist.