Neurotic Quotes - Page 8

• It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.

  Iain Banks

  Civilization, Might, Emptiness

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• I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.

  Helen Garner

  Dream, Writing, Self

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• What Women's Lib might achieve if their 'consciousness raising' - or in plain English, brainwashing- campaign succeeds is a society whose members have identical roles but are perpetually at war with themselves; a society of males made neurotic by suppressed masculinity, of females made miserable by having masculine roles thrust upon them that contradict their feminine impulses.

  Arianna Huffington

  War, Might, Succeed

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• My basic mistake in 'The World's Greatest Lover' was that I made the leading character a neurotic kook and sent him to Hollywood. I should have made him a perfectly normal, sane, ordinary person, and sent him to Hollywood. The audience identifies with the lead character.

  Gene Wilder

  Mistake, Character, Should Have

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• I was neurotic and weird from an early age.

  Joanne Froggatt

  Age

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• If civilization ever achieves a higher standard of what constitutes normality, it will have been the neurotic who led the way.

  Nancy Hale

  Civilization, Way, Achieve

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• When I spoke with psychoanalysts, they confirmed to me that the most neurotic relationship is always between mother and daughter. The cliché is to think it's because of the father, the absence of the father.

  Francois Ozon

  Mother, Daughter, Father

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Psycho-analysis has taught us that a boy's earliest choice of objects for his love is incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones - his mother and his sister. We have learnt, too, the manner in which, as he grows up, he liberates himself from this incestuous attraction. A neurotic, on the other hand, invariably exhibits some degree of psychical infantilism. He has either failed to get free from the psychosexual conditions that prevailed in his childhood or he has returned to them - two possibilities which may be summed up as developmental inhibition and regression.

  Sigmund Freud

  Mother, Growing Up, Boys

  Sigmund Freud (2003). “Totem and Taboo”, p.19, Routledge

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• The more I focused on my need to get better the worse I actually got - the more neurotic and self-conscious and self-absorbed I became.

  Tullian Tchividjian

  Self, Get Better, Needs

  Source: www.lifeisstory.com

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• I could never write about the sort of people John Cheever or John Updike or even Margaret Atwood write about. I don't mean I couldn't write as well as they do, which of course I couldn't; they're great writers, and I'm no writer at all. But I couldn't even write badly about normal, neurotic people. I don't know that world from the inside. That's just not my orientation.

  Jim Woodring

  Mean, Writing, People

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

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• I can honestly say this industry hasn't made me neurotic about my looks, except maybe my weight. I hope my clothes kind of reflect that. They're meant to make you feel good.

  Stella McCartney

  Clothes, Feel Good, Looks

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I don't want comedy to be Bridesmaids 2. I'm not denigrating Bridesmaids but, enough already, let's stop pretending women are incalculably different to us. Seeking out podcasts, listening on headphones, it's like an intimate, specific conversation. People respond if it feels from the heart. I'm as neurotic a human being as lives, and I have my faults. I'm a drunk. But people really like that.

  Greg Proops

  Heart, Enough Already, People

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• I have all my ex-girlfriends lumped into one big girlfriend I called M.A.N.D.Y.: My, Another Neurotic Disappointment? Yes.

  Dana Gould

  Girlfriend, Disappointment, Big Girl

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• Mike Royce and I have always had success writing what we know. What we know now is that we're middle-aged, neurotic and fat.

  Ray Romano

  Success, Writing, Middle

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• I think people are used to people in show business having a lot of hubris. I think I have a normal amount of self-loathing but because I'm in show business it's considered self-deprecation. In normal life I would just be considered your average neurotic.

  Jon Stewart

  Thinking, Self, Average

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• My life was typical. I played a little Little League baseball. I never wanted for food. I always had shoes. I had a room. There were no great tragedies. There were the typical ups and downs but I wouldn' t say it was at all sad. We were Jewish and living in the suburbs so there was a slightly neurotic bent to it, but I can't point to anything where a boy overcame a tragedy to become a comedian. As my grandmother used to say, 'I can't complain.

  Jon Stewart

  Baseball, Grandmother, Boys

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• After 50 years of television, there's no other conclusion the aliens could draw, but that most humans are neurotic, death-hungry, dysfunctional idiots.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Years, Television, Aliens

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.242, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.

  Terence McKenna

  Ego, Males, Population

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• Playing in (the Neurotic Outsiders) with John Taylor was great. A lot of pussy every time we played a gig. So many chicks. It was, like, 'Wow, John, really? So this is what it was like, huh?' And there would be like a couple guys with mohawks and a guy with, like, a jean jacket coming in to see me and Jonesy!

  Duff McKagan

  Couple, Guy, Pussy

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• The ego will endure the worst agonies of neurotic misery rather than consent to one minute of diminishment of its sense of importance.

  Helen M. Luke

  Agony, Ego, Misery

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• We all have obligations and duties toward our fellow men. But it does seem curious enough that in modern neurotic society, men's energies are consumed in making a living and rarely in living itself. It takes a lot of courage for a man to declare, with clarity and simplicity, that the purpose of life is to enjoy it.

  Lin Yutang

  Men, Simplicity, Fellow Man

  Yutang Lin (1962). “The pleasures of a nonconformist”

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• There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.

  Doris Lessing

  Children, School, Thinking

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• The line between pride in our work and neurotic obstinacy is a narrow one. We make our recommendations clear. But we do not grudge our clients the right to the final say. It is their money.

  David Ogilvy

  Pride, Finals, Lines

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• Mature art, I think, emerges when there's a certain balance
  of tensions, when there's neither neurotic prostration nor
  cold rationality, but an aura of energy and a drive to grasp
  personal "truths" still emerging into perception.
  To grasp and to shape them.

  Earle Birney

  Art, Thinking, Perception

  Earle Birney (1972). “The cow jumped over the moon: the writing and reading of poetry”, Holt McDougal

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• Every neurotic is partly in the right.

  Alfred Adler

  Alfred Adler (2005). “The Collected Clinical Works of Alfred Adler: Case histories”, p.16, Alfred Adler Institute

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