I get very tense working, so I often have to get up and wander around the house. It is very bad on my stomach. I have to be mad to be working well anyway, and then I am mad about the way things are going on the page in addition. My ulcer flourishes and I have to chew lots of pills. When my work is going well, I am usually sort of sick.

If death itself were to die, would it have a ghost, and would the ghost of death visit the dead in the guise of someone alive, if only to fright them from any temptation to return?

As a teacher, it's a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don't believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.

I do think of my reader, or listener, really, more often, if I give a lecture, for example, and I know that I'm talking to these people; I enjoy sort of preening them a bit. But it's a matter of decorum, basically.

I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.

The expression to write something down suggests a descent of thought to the fingers whose movements immediately falsify it.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house