Quotes About Psychology

I actually met a cop who worked with street gangs. I wanted to understand what drives someone who deals with very hardened criminals on a daily basis. How do you turn that off when you go home at night?

People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.

The self is hateful.

The thing about abuse is it's just a cycle of hatred. The person who is gonna abuse you has been abused, and he continues that same cycle of hatred.

I'm fascinated by the way early experiences haunt and revisit you, remain present in your life for decades and decades - they can even shape who you ultimately become.

I think for anybody reading the book they're going to get an idea in their heads of all those characters, and I think that once that gets fixed, it's quite hard to shake.

Because at bottom, I'm interested in fear, and in courage and cowardice and these are easier to get at through fiction, where you can enter people's heads.

I've never had any interest in reading the real-life stories of criminals. I don't want to get inside their heads.

In boxing, there are lot of things that happen where they try to slow down the process and try to get to the other team, trying to get into our heads.

Norma Bates is insanely crazy, but you can't help but love her.

I always try to look for the hidden face of the character, the hidden face that we all have.

I think a lot of people are curious about what makes people do what they do, and I guess my curiosity isn't hidden in any way.

I have a very highly developed sense of denial.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.

Sanity was statistical.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system

That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.

Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.

It may be—I will argue so—that communication outward is only a secondary, socially stimulated phase in the acquisition of language. Speaking to oneself would be the primary function (considered by L. S. Vygotsky in the early 1930s, this profoundly suggestive hypothesis has received little serious examination since).

If we are to die, it will be from internal failures, from the ungovernable dark places of the mind – the scaffolding left over from evolution's bloody building program.

Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon

Besides, it was a well-known maxim that maniacs must be humoured.