Clearly, many branches of science need an exquisite precision of timekeeping and the infinitesimal decimals of calibration, so space launches, for example, are not scheduled for leap-second dates. But society as a whole neither needs that obsessive time measurement nor is well served by it.
Obsessive devotion to creating can spark that which is called 'genius.' Smarter or more gifted? The 'madness' is the insatiable drive to discover, achieve and create. Monomania can develop into 'genius,' as the individual delves deeper into the process leaving normal parameters behind.
Van Gogh is the best example of how a person can be on the right track, propelled by gut feeling and some kind of strange obsessive stubborn conviction, that no one seems to understand.
A work of art enters life very much like another human being - complicated, loaded with overtones and meaning, mysterious, enticing, obsessive, and beautiful. There's no way to control how it will be used, how it will be read, and that's part of the excitement of it.
I'm wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I'm told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.
The intellectual ... may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.
The very things I used to be told off for - daydreaming, exaggerating, making mistakes, wild guessing, contradicting, spying, being obsessive, being reckless - for these, suddenly, I am being praised.
I knew I was breaking about a dozen laws but I guess I had different attitudes to stuff like that since the war. Laws were for the stupid the immature the irresponsible. The inflexible and the narrow-minded. The prejudiced. The obsessive. The lazy and careless and selfish and spoilt. The violent.
The movers and shakers have always been obsessive nuts.
I categorize nerds as creative-obsessive. A lot of nerds are creative people who obsess almost unnaturally over the minutiae of things.
I used to be an obsessive outliner - figuring that writing without an outline was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down.
Boulez's only concern is with power. He lost the leadership of the avant-guard more than ten years ago to Stockhausen. Now others have moved in. With the need for power, where was he to go? So he chose to be a conductor. He is a wonderful musician, a wonderful intelligence. It's a pity there is no humanity there. Does he have sex? I think not. When men have no sex, they go after power in this big, obsessive way.
Good things come to obsessive compulsives who fixate.
I had to be extremely strong to fight off Mr Hitchcock. He was so insistent and obsessive, but I was an extremely strong young woman, and there was no way he was going to get the better of me.
When you're obsessive, like me, searching for something unattainable can become unhealthy ... it's like falling through the air and grabbing at the clouds.
Collectors become obsessive and then addicted. You become addicted to art and you can't live without it.
I had enormous self-image, problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing. It's exactly what I do now except I enjoy it now. I'm not driven like I was in my twenties. I was driven to get through life very quickly.
I'm as obsessive with health as I was with destruction.
Dedication, absolute dedication, is what keeps one ahead. A sort of indomitable obsessive dedication and the realization that there is no end or limit to this because life is simply an ever-growing process, an ever-renewing process.
I probably do have an obsessive personality, but striving for perfection has served me well
I'm an anorak. I've always been an obsessive collector of things. Richard Briers collects stamps. I collect cars and guns, which are much more expensive, and much more difficult to store.
I'm obsessive about the kind of melodrama of getting through the days and trying to make them good and funny and a happy experience. But my feeling towards the fans is that they delivered me from darkness.
Every first-rate editor I have ever heard of reads, edits and rewrites every word that goes into his publication.... Good editors are not 'permissive'; they do not let their colleagues do 'their thing'; they make sure that everybody does the 'paper's thing.' A good, let alone a great editor is an obsessive autocrat with a whim of iron, who rewrites and rewrites, cuts and slashes, until every piece is exactly the way he thinks it should have been done.
It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.
These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.
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