Date: July, 1962; November 22, 1962; 1973

"Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade--demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out."

— Nabokov, Vladimir (1899-1977)

Date: 1964

"Its productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. ...

— Marcuse, Herbert (1898-1979)

Date: 1966, 1968

"Otherwise they [the people we used to be] turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."

— Didion, Joan (b. 1934)

Date: 1968

"There is a little man who lives in one's head. The little man keeps a library."

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

Date: 1968

"This is, I think, perfectly correct. The little man [in one's head], as we might say, has in his library pamphlets entitled 'Tying One's Shoes', 'Speaking Latin', and 'Typing 'Afghanistan"', but no pamphlet entitled 'Being Intelligent' or 'Speaking Latin Fluently' or 'Typing "Afghanistan" with P...

— Fodor, Jerry (b. 1935)

Date: 1970

"I should, rather, speak of a labyrinth. I am not concerned here with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic centre, ego or fate, but all the more with the many entrances leading into the interior."

— Benjamin, Walter (1892-1940)

Date: 1972

"My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare; / I had to cram so many things to store everything in there."

— Bowie, David [David Robert Jones] (1947-2016)

Date: 1980

"The back of the mind is a small hotel / And when the residents go on picnics / Or take buckets and spades down to the sea / The betrayals begin."

— Longley, Michael (b. 1939)

Date: July, 2015 [1983]

"Marx taught us in fact to understand once and for all what implacable work the unknown, the infinite vanquished victors, carry out in the societies that would prefer to ignore them, as well as within ourselves; what tunnels they dig, what blast-holes they prepare even inside those who hate them ...

— Lattes, Franco [Franco Fortini] (1917-1994)

Date: 1984

"At any given time, I'm aware that my mind and imagination are setting towards a particular compass point, that the whole edifice is preparing itself to lean in one way, like a great ramshackle barn."

— Ballard, J. G. (1930-2009)