Lyle Kessler Quotes

There are parts of me that I keep secret even from myself. I have demons and I'd love to be able to healthily look at the demons and still be a wonderful actor and not feel I need them to create.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

If you don't deal with your demons, they will deal with you, and it's gonna hurt.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Sometimes I think I'm the craziest person on the planet.

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

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.

The thoughts of my emotionally so disturbed days must be found again, shifted and developed further. Here and there something of the loose remarks I make must be used, but only when it finds my attention again.

I am a spy in the house of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that is me. I am somewhat nonplused by the event that is my life.

I have moments of darkness, of anger, and moments of rage. They do creep up at the most inopportune times. Not to recognize that in my music would give people a sense of sainthood that I don't necessarily have or even want to have.

I was raised in an atmosphere of 'everything's fine.' But as I got older, I was like, 'Well no, everything's not fine. There is stuff that's sad.' I am a really sensitive person. I think I am too sensitive sometimes.

The process of getting conscious, for me, was a very, very uncomfortable, disturbing, and sometimes physically painful process. And so that's the standard to which I write, because it was what I've experienced over my time.

I enjoy playing characters who are struggling, particularly with themselves.

Everyone has monsters and demons within themselves. They're metaphors for the human condition.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

I feel like I'm in my own head a lot; it just feels amazing, but scary, weird and confusing.

My first four books, from 'Fight Club' to 'Choke,' dealt with personal identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were generated by themselves.

I think we all have identity crises throughout our lives.

We all - if we are honest with ourselves, we all have these dark spaces within our souls that we don't always want to talk about or acknowledge.

We all have dark shadows in our self that come out every now and then.

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

A conscience is a troublesome thing at times. I woke up at 4 o'clock this morning and I spent the time feeling what a nothing I was, and wishing I was so very different. Then the morning's post brought me a letter from a friend, saying I was so this, so that - it made me really cry, I was so grateful.

Doubt, not self-reflection, comes from a destructive energy, and when it rears its head, I talk to it like a lunatic.

More than ever, I had to analyze my mental state over the past couple of years because of all the things that happened since the last album came out. Just being surrounded by lots of noise - good and bad - and still being able to try to hold onto some kind of identity for myself.

I'm a horrible person. And it's just coming out in my work.