Quotes on Selves

We benefit, intellectually and personally, from the interplay between different selves, from the balance between long-term contemplation and short-term impulse. We should be wary about tipping the scales too far. The community of selves shouldn't be a democracy, but it shouldn't be a dictatorship, either.

Psychologists and economists love to talk about the notion of two selves: present self and future self. It's a nice way to explain the tendency to have one preference about the future, but a very different preference when the future becomes the present.

I realize that men and women of the military go out and sacrifice their lives and put their selves in harm's way for my freedom of speech and my freedoms in this country, and my freedom to take a seat or take a knee, so I have the utmost respect for them, and I think what I did was taken out of context and spun a different way.

Writing has certainly helped me explore about 20,000 versions of my authentic self. I suppose that's what most writers discover if they write long enough: there are a lot of selves roaming around in there.

Novelists embody plural selves all the time. What are characters, after all, if not other selves?

There are selves too big for one person to contain. You cannot call them selfish. There is nothing -ish about such selves. They are the self, as it were, itself.

The searching for our selves is the most agonizing, isn't it? - and yet the most stimulating - and one simply cannot escape it.