“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.

When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.

Whoever wants to reach a distant goal must take small steps.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.

The Unconscious by definition is what you are not conscious of. But the Analysts already know what’s in it – they should, because they put it all in beforehand.

A good novel is worth more than the best scientific study.

California is like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn’t really need. You can quote me on that.

Happiness can only be found if you can free yourself of all other distractions.

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you’ve fallen into good hands – someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

No realistic, sane person goes around Chicago without protection.

Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.

Imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.

Democratic regimes may be defined as those in which, every now and then, the people are given the illusion of being sovereign, while the true sovereignty in actual fact resides in other forces which are sometimes irresponsible and secret.

If only we can give them faith that mountains can be moved, they will accept the illusion that mountains are moveable, and thus an illusion may become reality.

We’re all mad, the whole damned race. We’re wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we’re all mad and in solitary confinement.

The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.