Anthony Storr

“Originality implies being bold enough to go beyond accepted norms.”

“I owed Lewis one thing, at least. Once you had suffered the experience of presenting a case at one of his Monday morning conferences, no other public appearance, whether on radio, TV or the lecture platform, could hold any terrors for you.”

“It's not psychopathology that counts. It's what you do with it.”

“With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species.”

“It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness. Yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.”

“It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.”

“The sane are madder than we think, the mad saner.”

“I get intrigued by a puzzle, and writing a book is the best way to solve it.”

“The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of ‘adaptation through maladaptation’ which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.”

“I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place.”

“If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears.”

“The professional must learn to be moved and touched emotionally, yet at the same time stand back objectively: I've seen a lot of damage done by tea and sympathy.”

“Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.”

“Since I was not able wholly to subscribe to any one set of beliefs advanced by any 'guru' I had to fall back on my own, however derivative.”