People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it.
You start acting in spite of your neuroses, not because of them.
Sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.
The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.
Somehow we manage it: to like our friends, to tolerate not only their little ways but their huge neuroses, their monumental oddness: "Oh well," we smile, "it's one of his funny days. "
Religion [is] the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity
I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
Somehow the past is a safe place to explore our collective cultural neuroses.
So maybe it’s just a part of who we all are, and always were. My worry now, though, is that we are starting to nurture these neuroses of ours, and treating them like pets. That can’t be a good thing.
Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.
I'm not sure I want all my neuroses cleared up
Happiness is your original nature, it is YOU, minus your neurosis
I used to be neurotic. I didn't like myself very much. But somewhere in my mid-40s, my neuroses stopped seeming so important. I developed a sense of humor.
Boredom is the only sure cure for neurosis.
Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.
What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.
Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.
Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge. . . . Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.