Any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it.

Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.

The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.

All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.

Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.

Society is an insane asylum ran by the inmates.

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.

There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.

There's no time like the present to love deeply, claim our power and live our purpose!

Stop worrying about someone else's feelings for once and worry about your grade.

Dogs are happy with few things because they have already observed man who is unhappy with many things!

Hollywood is a great place if you're an orange.

It was an exceptional sensation, reading by spiderlight.

One more recent novelist to come along is Cormac McCarthy. Him, I like.

The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, All on a summer day: The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, And took them quite away!

I find if I just sit down and think, a solution presents itself.

The most powerful thing you can do to change the world is to change your own beliefs about the nature of life, people, and reality to something more positive... and begin to act accordingly.