psychological contrast Quotes

I began to discriminate between fear and excitement. The two, though very close, are completely different. Fear is negative excitement, choking your imagination. Real excitement produces an energy that overcomes apprehension and makes you want to close in on your goal.

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

How does it happen that something that makes so much sense in the moonlight doesn't make any sense at all in the sunlight?

I do flip between being chatty and argumentative - and being a psycho-loner werewolf.

Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self.

Personally, I prefer to play against the look: If a character appears particularly unhinged, with makeup running down her face, I like to play her as if she has it together. I think that juxtaposition makes it so much more interesting.

It's nice to play someone who functions in a very different way than I do.

I like the way that psychological extremity can illuminate more 'normal' characters by forcing a comparison.

For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.

What is fear but courage's shadow?

Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.

The greatest grossness sometimes accompanies the greatest refinement, as a natural relief.

Normally, we see characters that have God complexes. How interesting, I thought, it would be to capitalize on that. And say, OK, well fine, you have a God complex, well this person has a Satan complex. And the doctor chooses to treat him scientifically.

Change follows change in us, almost without transition; we pass from blissful rapture to sobbing woe; a single step divides our sublimest ecstasies from the darkest depth of spiritual despondency.

I... had my mind blown by all the opportunities that were in California in the '60s and '70s. In Detroit, everything was Freud... Out here, everything was Jung.

It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.

It is a curious fact that in bad days we can very vividly recall the good time that is now no more; but that in good days, we have only a very cold and imperfect memory of the bad.