Quotes About Psychology

Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.

It's very difficult to get an audience to be terrified of what's going on. Think about it: You're in a room with so many other people, so for them to be terrified and to care about what's going on on-screen takes a lot of work.

I am actually terrified of horror films.

It's terrifying, social media. It terrifies me.

The male ego is a terrifying, terrifying thing, you know? If it's shattered, it becomes even more dangerous.

Clowns drink to blot out the ravages of terrifying children for a living.

What is terrifying is the ability, through mass brainwashing or propaganda, to change normal human instinct, which does not necessarily contain very much hatred.

We all know that the 'reality' of reality TV is an artful construction, an effect not only of editing but of a Lorenzian rat-in-a-mirrored-labyrinth artificial environment which attenuates psychology into a series of territorial twitches.

If people are telling you a story about themselves, they gradually map their own local territories and know themselves by them.

What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime - terror.

So it's sheer terror, but then, this is the whole reason that we went so long to Doctor Simons, was to get rid of all these... mixed feelings that we had.

I'd say that in place of a singular phobic-level terror, I keep a whole collection of running, yet manageable, fears.

The people and places that cause terror in childhood cause attraction in adulthood. We end up being repetitively attracted to the same kind of person that obliges us by acting out the same behavior over again.

Now, academics are not always the easiest people to talk to, and the scholarly papers aren't always the easiest papers to read, but frankly, psychology papers, especially papers and books on terrorism, are very easy to read, and journalists should be reading them.

For many terrorists, carrying out an attack allowed them to become the heroes of their own story.

You initially become funny as a kid because you're looking for attention and love. Psychologists think that's all to do with mother abandonment. I think John Cleese has his depressions, and Terry Gilliam's the same. All of us together make one completely insane person.

But what many psychologists have done, probably because they did well on a test themselves and everyone wants high self esteem, is to create this little box and then do their research inside it.

They don't teach you just how to be in school. There's no class on that. There's no multiple choice test for Why Do I Feel This Way?

These syllables, about 2,300 in number, were mixed together and then drawn out by chance and used to construct series of different lengths, several of which each time formed the material for a test.

It's always good to win a Test match and if you win it comfortably, it can leave a few psychological marks on opposition sides.

Can you design a Rorschach test that's going to make everyone feel something every time - and that looks like a Rorschach test? It's easy to show a picture of a kitten or a car accident. The question is, how abstract can you get and still get the audience to feel something when they don't know what's happening to them?

Check your testosterone levels. Every study on evolutionary psychology has correlated testosterone levels with dominance.

I love taking a character and raining holy hell down on them and seeing how they respond, how they react. It's one of the things I do in almost all my books - my protagonist is put through a very stressful situation that tests their strength and their psychological acuity. That's one of the core components of who I am as a writer.

In the present crisis of masculinity we do not need, as some feminists are saying, less masculine power. We need more. But we need more of the mature masculine. We need more Man psychology. We need to develop a sense of calmness about masculine power so we don't have to act out dominating, disempowering behavior toward others.