Psychological Release Quotes

The number of mystery and horror writers I've met who are just the sanest and the nicest people... it's crazy. Maybe it's because the writing gets something out of the system?

I went into acting as psychotherapy, and it's still a work in progress.

True peace of mind comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think it means a release of energy.

I think you often have that sense when you write--that if you can spot something in yourself and set it down on paper, you're free of it. And you're not, of course; you've just managed to set it down on paper, that's all.

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching. What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground. Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone.

To me, acting is the most logical way for people's neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves.

Some people ask why people would go into a dark room to be scared. I say they are already scared, and they need to have that fear manipulated and massaged. I think of horror movies as the disturbed dreams of a society.

You're free because you don't have to expose yourself, and you can go wild, and let your id completely out of its box, and nobody will see you because you're operating through a surrogate. It's an opportunity to crack open your shell, to melt down yourself, and just let yourself go. It's a form of catharsis for me.

In a way, art is a great way to release your love, fantasy, and desires. It's like a fetish. It's a comfortable way of excising a lot of your conscience.

You don't enter the theater and pay your money to be afraid. You enter the theater and pay your money to have the fears that are already in you when you go into a theater dealt with and put into a narrative.

On the song 'Buried Alive,' it's almost like the instrumental is a therapist.

Horror serves a cathartic role in human society, all throughout the world. It is a way of confronting the darkness, both within and without.

In the beginning this is bound to happen. You have been sitting on the lid that covers your repressions, and you have been riding on that lid a long time, trying continuously to hold down everything beneath it. To become a witness means that you have finally jumped off the lid; now you will only stand aside and will not do anything. Now you will no longer repress, now you will just witness. So everything suppressed will arise, all the repressions will catch fire; you will find flames leaping where there were only ashes.

I'm the most mellow person offstage. I think it's just, going onstage lets me get out some frustration that I'm too shy to do in real life. Instead of doing it in private, I'd rather do it in front of 1,000 people who've paid $25 to see me lose my mind.

The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them.

I sometimes think it's like a weird elastic band. The more tragic your work is, the quicker you snap back. There's a catharsis in telling a miserable old tale; you get rid of demons.

I think there might be some pressure released while I'm doing autobiographical work, but afterwards everything remains the same.

I be crazy too, little buddy, but at least when I be craziest, I be floating all alone in space and the crazy, she float out of me, she soak into the walls, and she don't come out till there be battles and little boys bump into the walls and squish out de crazy.

There is a great relief in experiencing the worst vicariously.

There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud's being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more - that dreams are the psyche's way of taking a good dump every now and then.

I think it's quite common for actors to almost rely on their characters to exercise parts of themselves in their regular life they don't tend to explore so much.

In reality, we can only talk about things that we already overcame in our minds.

In therapy , the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.

We need emotional outlets in this country, and the more artistic people we develop the better it will be for us as a nation.