psychological introspection Quotes

When I look at myself, I see a person who strangely lacks what I consider the ingredients of a personality.

New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection.

Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is ? a vice?

You spend hours alone, only with your thoughts, and you torture yourself. It's a tendency of many writers to temper the self-destructive act of writing with other self-destructive acts. I certainly was one of those people for a long time.

I was starting to come to grips with the fact that I had created a lot of pain and suffering around me, not just within me.

There was all this loneliness in my cartoons and people would say, "Gee, these characters are so lonely, disconnected, depressed." And I'd say, 'Yeah well, that's not me. I'm just interested in that because I think it makes a funny drawing.' But later I understood it was me in many respects; my hand was doing it ahead of the head's understanding.

I don't know what a shrink would call me. I don't want to know.

I didn't realize then that so much of being adult is reconciling ourselves with the awkwardness and strangeness of our own feelings. Youth is the time of life lived for some imaginary audience

You must experience everything that you are feeling. This is what will lead you to the splintered parts of your personality.

It's (the lack of communication between the people in his paintings, ed.) probably a reflection of my own, if I may say, loneliness. I don't know. It could be the whole human condition.

Innumerable changes of moods are yours, and they are uncontrolled by you. If you knew their origin, you would be able to dominate them. If you cannot localize your own changes, how can you localize that which formed you?

Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself.

Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterize modern thought, but Hamlet invented it

I more fear what is within me than what comes from without.

...one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.

Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

I do not remember joy or sorrow in childhood, but listening for clues.

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.

Some are exploring the world through the subconscious. I've done that on occasions for various reasons, whether it be illness or self abuse, or whatever. Once things start to look grotesque I don't write them or sing them. I couldn't write them - making nightmares into living daylight...The minute it gets dark I shoot back, retreat.

The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment. But there’s only so much truth to a theoretical understanding of something.

I sometimes wonder if the inability to find oneself makes one seek oneself in other people, in characters.

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 don't know what it says about me that I have a greater affinity with the damaged. Probably nothing good.

The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.

I always resist seeing my own personal motivation in my work, but I guess it must be there on some level. And I do feel very much that my life follows the kinds of things I talk about in my books. I've always thought of myself as an insanely lucky person, so perhaps the success of my first two books led me to want to examine this phenomenon on some unconscious level.