In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.

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.

Originality implies being bold enough to go beyond accepted norms.

Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as delusional. Belief systems which may be just as irrational but which are shared by millions are called world religions.

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

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.

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

Some split between the inner world and outer world is common to all behaviour, and the need to bridge the gap is the source of creative behaviour.

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

One man's faith is another man's delusion.

All the world loves a lover, and a lover loves all the world.

The human spirit is not indestructible; but a courageous few discover that, when in hell, they are granted a glimpse of heaven.

If creative work protects a man against mental illness, it is small wonder that he pursues it with avidity; and even if the state of mind he is seeking to avoid is no more than a mild state of depression or apathy, this still constitutes a cogent reason for engaging in creative work even when it brings no obvious external benefit in its train.

The creative consequences of man's imaginative strivings may never make him whole; but they constitute his deepest consolations and his greatest glories.

What chiefly concerns and alarms many of us are the problems arising from religious fanaticism. As long as large numbers of militant enthusiasts are persuaded that they alone have access to the truth, and that the rest of us are infidels, we remain under threat. Lord Acton's famous phrase about power can be used of another danger. Dogma tends to corrupt, and absolute dogma corrupts absolutely.

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

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.

A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationship -- a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is: a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression; in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.

It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that have led to man's extraordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy him.

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