The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality -- to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting -- but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail. It is as if to say: if these are not valued -- if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing -- are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.
ADAM PHILLIPS, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness
You'll find yourself going back to certain poems again and again. After all, they are only words on a page, but you go back because something that really matters to you is evoked in you by the words. And if somebody said to you, Well, what is it? or What do your favorite poems mean?, you may well be able to answer it, if you've been educated in a certain way, but I think you'll feel the gap between what you are able to say and why you go on reading.
ADAM PHILLIPS, The Paris Review, spring 2014
When I sit down to write, I have a lot to write, but beforehand, I don't. I'm not full of ideas. Writing is the way I think.
ADAM PHILLIPS, Bomb Magazine, fall 2010
Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
ADAM PHILLIPS, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness
How one writes is a bit of a mystery to oneself. You just do it. My experience is that I sit down and write and I make it sound right to me, or sound good or interesting. And that's it.
ADAM PHILLIPS, "Poetry as Therapy," The Guardian, Mar. 29, 2012
We are encouraged to believe, for example, that there are consensual objects of desire, that every man wants a certain woman. Well, actually, every man doesn’t want that certain woman. The really frightening thing about desire is how idiosyncratic it is. We may desire people whom we might not like, or want, or whom other people might not think beautiful. So idiosyncratic is it that we want to pool this feeling, foreclose it, into consensual objects. The culture is encouraging the belief that there's more consensus than there in fact is.
ADAM PHILLIPS, Bomb Magazine, fall 2010
The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
ADAM PHILLIPS, Darwin's Worms On Life Stories and Death Stories
Nature is astonishingly prolific, but it is a prodigal process going nowhere special, sponsored by destruction and suffering. What is wonderful and inspiring is the possibility of infinite variation and exquisite adaptation; what is daunting and terrible is the cost. Nature is abundant and unremittingly cruel from, as it were, a personal point of view.
ADAM PHILLIPS, Darwin's Worms On Life Stories and Death Stories
The emotional impact of music is so incommensurate with what people can say about it, and that seems to be very illustrative of something fundamental—that very powerful emotional effects often can’t be articulated. You know something’s happened to you but you don’t know what it is.
ADAM PHILLIPS, The Paris Review, spring 2014
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
ADAM PHILLIPS, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
If you want to be with somebody who gets you, you prefer collusion to desire, safety to excitement.
ADAM PHILLIPS, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Art as Magic is a forbidden and illegitimate pleasure, and ... what we are ashamed of wanting most are our wishful apprehensions. The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true. Apart, that is, from the artist.
ADAM PHILLIPS, On Balance
Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
ADAM PHILLIPS, On Balance
Greed is a way of avoiding making choices: if I have everything I don't have to choose what I want. And choosing what I want means giving up some pleasures for other pleasures.
ADAM PHILLIPS, On Balance
On the one hand, psychoanalysis is practical in the sense that there is an attempt to solve a problem, or to cure somebody, or at least to address their suffering. But the other thing that psychoanalysis does is that the project is to enable somebody to speak. It's the attempt to create the conditions in which somebody can speak themselves as fully as possible.
ADAM PHILLIPS, "Poetry as Therapy," The Guardian, Mar. 29, 2012
