Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.

Only imagination and belief can differentiate from the rest certain objects, certain people, and can create an atmosphere.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.