Unacknowledged Fears Quotes

Dreaming men are haunted men.

There is a place in men's lives where pictures do in fact bleed, ghosts gibber and shriek, maidens run forever through mysterious landscapes from nameless foes; that place is, of course, the world of dreams and of the repressed guilts and fears that motivate them [i.e., the unconscious]. This world the dogmatic optimism and shallow psychology of the Age of Reason had denied; and yet this world it is the final, perhaps the essential, purpose of the gothic romance to assert.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

I've got to start listening to those quiet, nagging doubts.

Most men have an insecurity of some sort. But we're brought up to believe that we can't show them.

The greatest impediments to changes in our traditional roles seem to lie not in the visible world of conscious intent, but in the murky realm of the unconscious mind.

There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.

A lot of my characters are people who are, in essence, lying to themselves. They present one thing, when in reality they're another thing. Maybe they're not as tough or as cool as they want to be.

British culture loves the image of itself in the mirror; it doesn't want to look deep inside, behind the eyes, inside the brain, inside where those shivers and nightmares lie.