For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.

The creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is a creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural denials of the real nature of ex­perience. And the price of this kind of almost "extra human" crea­tivity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known.

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

Genuine heroism for man is still the power to support contradictions, no matter how glaring or hopeless they may seem.

Man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.

When you confuse personal love and cosmic heroism you are bound to fail in both spheres. The impossibility of the heroism undermines the love, even if it is real. This double failure is what produces the sense of utter despair that we see in modern man... Love, then, is seen a religious problem

Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.