When I was in my teens I had issues with OCD.

Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Creativity has got to start with humanity and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

Pound’s crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don’t put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

I don’t carry the burden of the past or the madness of the future. I live in the present.

The only way round is through.

Games lubricate the body and the mind.

Everything negative – pressure, challenges – is all an opportunity for me to rise.

People tend to think that because I’m a performer and I don’t go to a regular high school that I haven’t personally been affected by bullies. But it’s actually quite the contrary.

The best way out of a difficulty is through it.

In fact, you couldn’t give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.

I just think it’s so important not to take yourself too seriously.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

I come from a family of 12, so I kind of got a little lost as a child.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

We did it Disneyland, in the knowledge that most of the people I talked to thought it would be a financial disaster – closed and forgotten within the first year.

People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing.

Hermits have no peer pressure.

I got a job when I was 15 because my allowance was about $20 a week which in New York was impossible. So I used to waitress across the street from where I grew up.

If you’re serious, you really understand that it’s important that you laugh as much as possible and admit that you’re the funniest person you ever met. You have to laugh. Admit that you’re funny. Otherwise, you die in solemnity.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I’m not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.

It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition.

State formation has been a brutal project, with many hideous consequences. But the results exist, and their pernicious aspects should be overcome.

There are going to be good days and bad days. Bottom line.

When I was fourteen and first started going out, I always wanted to be the opposite of everyone else. So I would go to the club in a polo T-shirt and pants and sneakers and a hat on backward, just so I would not be dressed like other girls.

I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse. So for me, it’s a great thing to be able to scream and say whatever I want.

Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed, and rightly.

There’s a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I’m affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn’t want to leave. He likes it very much.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have fear of failure. I have nights when I show up at the arena and I’m like, ‚My back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt. I don’t have it. I just want to chill.‘ We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.

Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.

Cycling is a joy and faster than many other modes of transport, depending on the time of day. It clears the head.

I guess there is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you get so sore at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young.

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.

Everyone knows nowadays that people ‚have complexes‘. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

I never give advice unless someone asks me for it. One thing I’ve learned, and possibly the only advice I have to give, is to not be that person giving out unsolicited advice based on your own personal experience.

Women in particular need to keep an eye on their physical and mental health, because if we’re scurrying to and from appointments and errands, we don’t have a lot of time to take care of ourselves. We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‚to do‘ list.

I’m the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him.

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It’s a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we’re telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

Sleep is the best meditation.

Our brains are either our greatest assets or our greatest liabilities.

As we dread any disease that undermines the health of the body, so should we deplore contention, which is a corroding canker of the spirit.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

Sometimes, women in families put themselves last until it manifests itself in their own health.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‚hurry sickness.‘ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.