Neurosis Quotes - Page 10

• A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior.

  David Brin

  Behavior, Bizarre

  David Brin (2009). “The Uplift War”, p.221, Spectra

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• The edge in modern painting is charged with neurosis; it meets a world that no longer confirms it but which is hostile or at best indifferent.

  Andrew Graham-Dixon

  World, Painting, Modern

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• An artist, in my experience, is a man or woman of unusual talent and peculiar, highly individual sensibility, with an independent and probably contrary mind, driven by mysterious passions for which another word is neurosis. In getting from point A to point B, the neurotic goes via point Q. It's in that roundabout that people are either completely crippled and hopeless in life, or highly creative.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Passion, Independent, Artist

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• Novelists are people who have discovered that they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Believe, Writing, Offering

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• Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.

  Carl Jung

  Passion, Men, Worst Enemy

  Carl Gustav Jung, Herbert Read, Michael Scott Montague Fordham, Gerhard Adler (1964). “The Collected Works of C.G. Jung: Civilization in transition”

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• I'm always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis.

  Loudon Wainwright III

  Song, Writing, Answers

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• In the end, I feel that one has to have a bit of neurosis to go on being an artist. A balanced human seldom produces art. It's that imbalance which impels us... The artist lives with anxiety.

  Beverly Pepper

  Art, Anxiety, Imbalance

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• I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

  Doris Lessing

  Block, Mean, Essence

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• What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Hero, Writing, Disease

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