What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms.

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

Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level.

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.

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

People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves