The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.

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

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.

It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

In seeking to avoid evil, humanity is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is our ingenuity, rather than our animal nature, that has given our fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.

If everyone lives roughly the same lies about the same thing, there is no one to call them liars. They jointly establish their own sanity and themselves normal.

We are gods with anuses.