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.
Ernest BeckerOnce you base your whole life striving on a desperate lie, and try to implement that lie, you instrument your own undoing.
Ernest BeckerThe irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
Ernest BeckerTo live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.
Ernest BeckerThe 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 exยญperience. And the price of this kind of almost "extra human" creaยญtivity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known.
Ernest Becker