He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist’s success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a “narcissist,” but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

Unless one is inordinately fond of subordination, one is always at war.

Should you protect profits? Yes. But run for the hills? No.

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

Because that is when you love somebody - when you see them being game in the face of the worst. Not courageous. Not heroic. Just game.

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!