INFP

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Philosopher and author

Rousseau: "[My] heart [is] at once haughty and tender [and my] character effeminate, yet invincible."

Rousseau: "[When under stress I thought of] the books I had read [and applied] them to myself. I [imagined I was] one of the characters [and soon found myself] in made-up circumstances which were most agreeable to my inclinations."

Rousseau: "Reason is greatly indebted to passion. The human race would long since have ceased to be, had its preservation depended only on reason."

INFP

Soeren Kierkegaard

Philosopher and theologian

Kierkegaard: "To pace about, looking to obtain status, looking to attain 'importance' - I can think of nothing more ridiculous."

Kierkegaard: "Whatever you do, never lose your fondness of walking. I walk myself into my daily well-being, and I walk out of all illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so heavy that one cannot outwalk it."

Alan Sandage: "Physicists, by and large, are Platonists who seek reality in the archetypes behind the scenes. Non-scientists, by and large, are Kierkegaardians for whom the subjectivity of life and thought is more real than scientific models."

INFP

Albert Camus

Philosopher and author

Camus: "We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives: Inside ourselves."

Camus: "To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."

Camus: "In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."

Paul Gallagher: "While Sartre could separate the world of ideas from his personal friendship, Camus ... believed friendship was essential [and] united people together in the struggle for a better world."

INFP

George Orwell

Author of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' and 'Animal Farm'

Orwell: "I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons."

Orwell: "From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books."

Orwell: "What I have most wanted to do ... is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice."

Orwell: "Politically I would describe myself as a 'conservative Trotskist.'"

INFP

C.S. Lewis

Author of 'The Chronicles of Narnia'

Lewis: "[There is] in me ... a distaste for all that is public, all that belongs to the collective."

Lewis: "[I have] a boorish inaptitude for formality."

Lewis: "[It is ridiculous] to be concerned about being grown up [and] to admire the grown up because it is grown up."

Lewis: "Friendship arises ... when two [people] discover that they have in common some ... interest or taste ...which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure."

INFP

Virginia Woolf

Author

Woolf: "My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"

Woolf: "The art of writing [is] imagining that one is not oneself, but somebody different."

Woolf: "Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title."

Woolf: "The eyes of others [are] our prisons; their thoughts our cages."

INFP

Augustine

Philosopher and theologian

Augustine: "The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but - what is worse - the slave of as many masters as he has vices."

Augustine: "[Those who are] swollen with pride [should learn from the] meek, and humble of heart, and they shall find peace."

Augustine: "God did not intend that man should have power over his fellow man."

Philip Ball: "Augustine ... did not materialize with a [fixed doctrine] but spent his life struggling towards some kind of personal truth."

INFP

John Kerry

U.S. Secretary of State (D) and Vietnam war veteran

Kerry: "There's a time ... to be totally in quiet listening mode when somebody else's mind is open to you."

[When asked why he threw his Vietnam war medals into a river:]
Kerry: "[Never] start a war. ... The USA should only go to war because we have to. And if you live by that guidance, you'll never have veterans throwing away their medals or standing up in protest."

Peggy Kerry: "Once you get to know him [he] is really a warm and open and funny human being."

Jonathan Winer: "[No one] can tell him what to do. You can suggest it, and maybe he'll do it and maybe he won't. But he is not going to surrender that personal autonomy that is the core of [his] integrity."

Nixon White House memo [ca. 1971]: "Destroy him before he becomes another Ralph Nader."

INFP

Thomas S. Kuhn

Philosopher

Kuhn: "After paradigms change ... you may ... reconstruct why people believed what they did. And do you want to say it's partly right and partly wrong? No. ... You can't divide what they were thinking up that way."

Kuhn: "The question of right and wrong [is not] the relevant question. ... That's not what I think the [history of science] is about."

Scientific American: "Kuhn realized that Aristotle's views of such basic concepts as motion and matter were totally unlike Newton's. ... Understood on its own terms, Aristotle's physics 'wasn't just bad Newton,' Kuhn says; it was just different."

INFP

Jared Diamond

Multi-field scientist and author of 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'

Diamond: "Be honest with yourself. ... Decide what is most important and do it regardless of what other people think."

Diamond: "The monumental ruins left behind by past societies hold a romantic fascination for all of us. ... We feel drawn to their often spectacular and haunting beauty, and also to the mysteries that they pose."

Slate Magazine: "Jared Diamond is a master of cultural and historical bricolage. His books weave epic stories about the human condition from the disparate cultural practices of a wide range of people living in different environments. ... In Diamond's usual fashion, he supports [his] arguments by way of anecdote."

INFP

Francis Fukuyama

Multi-field scientist and author of 'The End of History', student of Huntington

Fukuyama: "Every human being seeks to have his or her dignity recognized."

Fukuyama: "Transhumanism. ... The idea of genetically and cybernetically enhancing human beings is the most dangerous idea in the world."

Fukuyama: "[In my youth] the future and its terrifying possibilities were defined by two books, George Orwell's '1984' and Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World.'"

Fukuyama: "We do not have to regard ourselves as slaves to inevitable technological progress when that progress does not serve human ends."

Fukuyama: "You have to save capitalism from its own excesses."

INFP

Bjorn Lomborg

Multi-field scientist and author of 'The Skeptical Environmentalist'

Lomborg: "I'm an old Greenpeace guy, and my first reaction was exactly the same thing as I see most other people reacting to what I say."

Lomborg: "Preventable diseases ... take 15 million lives each year. ... Why should stopping climate change be our top priority?"

Business Week: "Bjorn Lomborg has shaken the environmental movement to its core. ... He argues that the global environment [is] actually getting better - not worse, as many environmentalists believe - and that policymakers should keep that in mind when allocating scarce government funds."

New York Times: "Strange to say, [he] is not a steely-eyed economist at a conservative Washington think tank but a vegetarian, backpack-toting academic who was a member of Greenpeace for four years."

Matt Ridley: "[He is] the official chief villain of the world environmental movement [and yet] he is leftish, concerned about world poverty, and no fan of big business."

INFP

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Author of 'The Little Prince'

Saint-Exupery: "One sees well only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

C.G. Jung: "From his wife I learned [that his preoccupation with] flight was really an act of evasion, an attempt to escape from the world."

INFP

A. A. Milne

Author of 'Winnie The Pooh'

Milne: "Even now when I see my name in the paper, I feel that the world is intruding unduly on my privacy. I ought to be anonymous."

Milne: "Sarcasm, directed into the blue in the hope of hitting the person you want, may not be effective, but it does relieve the feelings."

Milne: "There are people who keep thermometers shut up indoors, which is both cruel and unnecessary. When you complain that the library is a little chilly ... they look at the thermometer ... and say, 'Oh no; I don't think so. It's sixty-five.' As if anybody wanted a thermometer to know if a room were cold or not."

INFP

Bill Watterson

Cartoonist famous for 'Calvin & Hobbes'

Watterson: "[Doing everything myself] kept the strip very honest and personal - everything having to do with Calvin and Hobbes expressed my own ideas, my own values, my own way."

Watterson: "I was not prepared for the ... attention. ... Besides disliking the diminishment of privacy and the inhibiting quality of feeling watched. ... I didn't see how I could write honestly without [seclusion]."

INFP

J.K. Rowling

Author of the 'Harry Potter' series

Rowling: "The wizards represent all that the [normal person] most fears: They are plainly outcasts and comfortable with being so."

Rowling: "Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional than the unashamed misfit!"

Rowling: "Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can ... think themselves into other people's places."

INFP

Homer

Author of 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey'

Homer: "The blade itself incites to violence."

Homer: "Hateful to me ... is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another."

Vishwa Adluri: "Evidently, what fascinates Homer about ... language is not its instrumental precision but its [descriptive] richness."

Aristotle: "For while Homer handles irrationalities, he disguises them behind other good qualities, so as to allow them to exist. ... This is the excellence of Homer's style."

Schiller: "Philologists who use their knowledge to pick Homer apart practice a learned barbarism."

Nietzsche: "Goethe was a genius who fought a battle with himself to try and surpass the genius of Homer."

INFP

William Blake

Poet and printmaker, author of 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'

Blake: "A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent."

Blake: "To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit - general knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess."

Blake: "When I tell any truth it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it but for the sake of defending those who do."

Blake: "All deities reside in the human breast."

INFP

John Milton

Poet and author of 'Paradise Lost'

Milton: "He who reigns within himself and rules passions, desires, and fears is more than a king."

Milton: "Let truth and falsehood grapple. ... Truth is strong."

Milton: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."

INFP

Edgar Allan Poe

Poet and author

Poe: "They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

Poe: "All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream."

Poe: "Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence."

Poe: "With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion."

INFP

John Lennon

Singer-songwriter

Lennon: "If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace."

Lennon: "Either I'm a genius or I'm mad, which is it? ... I can't be mad because nobody's put me away; therefore I'm a genius. ... If there's such a thing as genius - I am one. And if there isn't, I don't care."

Lennon: "Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."

Paul McCartney: "We all looked up to John. He was ... very much the leader; he was ... the smartest and all that kind of thing."

INFP

Jim Morrison

(The Doors)

Morrison: "When others demand that we become the people they want us to be, they force us to destroy the person we really are. ... The most loving parents and relatives commit this murder with smiles on their faces."

Morrison: "[In society] you trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your senses for an act. You give up your ability to feel and in exchange, put on a mask."

Morrison: "There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first."

INFP

Kurt Cobain

(Nirvana)

Cobain: "I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all. None of them liked art or music, they just wanted to fight and get laid."

Cobain: "[My youth] gave me this real hatred for the average American macho male."

Cobain: "I would like to get rid of the homophobes, sexists, and racists in our audience. I know they're out there and it really bothers me."

Cobain: "I just can't believe anyone would start a band just to make the scene and be cool and have chicks. I just can't believe it."

INFP

Ian Curtis

(Joy Division)

Curtis: "I prefer to think of everyone as an individual."

Curtis: "I like to think that [Joy Division doesn't] belong to any category."

Len Brown: "Tributes paint Curtis as a lost prophet; as [someone] more sensitive, braver, and perhaps closer to God or godlessness than the rest of us; as if he'd held up his cracked mirror to show us how hopeless, meaningless and inhuman our world had become."

INFP

Tim Burton

Filmmaker, married to Helena Bonham Carter

Burton: "I have a problem when people say something's real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective."

Burton: "One person's craziness is another person's reality."

Burton: "I always liked strange characters."

INFP

Johnny Depp

Actor

Depp: "The characters I've played, that I've responded to, there has been a lost-soul quality to them."

Depp: "If there's any message to my work, it is ... that it's ok to be different."

Depp: "[In my career] I am doing things that are true to me."

Depp: "The only thing I have a problem with is being labeled."

INFP

Heath Ledger

Actor

Ledger: "People always feel compelled to sum you up, to presume that they have you and can describe you. ... There are many stories inside of me ... outside of [that] one flat note."

Ledger: "I take great pride in my soul and the consistency and longevity of my love."

INFP

Nicolas Cage

Actor

Cage: "[I've always] been in my own world."

Cage: "My imagination was my savior [in my childhood]. I was able to imagine things weren't bad, or I could go in the backyard and transform myself into an astronaut or some [other] character and play for hours."

Cage: "When people tell me I can't do something, I've always been compelled to do it."

INFP

Florence Welch

(Florence and the Machine)

Welch: "I was always that girl growing up who you could find dancing down supermarket aisles. It's that sense of not feeling inhibited. Dancing in supermarkets is my favorite thing."

Welch: "Love is horrible. ... When you're in love, it's like a sickness. Such madness."

Welch: "[I] always want things to be perfect, magical or exciting. Things can't be that way all the time so I'm constantly disappointed as well."

INFP

Björk

Singer-songwriter

Björk: "I am one of the most idiosyncratic people around."

[To an interviewer:]
Björk: "I've looked in my [diaries] and I only get angry once every seven years [so] you're safe tonight."

INFP

Tori Amos

Singer-songwriter

Amos: "I think you have to know who you are. Get to know the monster that lives in your soul. Dive deep into your soul and explore it."

Trent Reznor: "Tori Amos ... I always respected her work a lot."

INFP

Fiona Apple

Singer-songwriter

Apple: "[I didn't like the fact that representatives from Sony Music wanted to okay my tracks because] then they're in on the songwriting. And if I start doing that, then I'm dead."

INFP

Jarvis Cocker

(Pulp)

Cocker: "It's ok to grow up, just as long as you don't grow old."

Cocker: "[I've] always been a bit out of touch with reality."

Cocker: "I think I'm getting more male as I'm getting older."

INFP

Thom Yorke

(Radiohead)

Yorke: "The whole point of creating music for me is to give voice to things that aren't normally given voice to."

Yorke: "The West cannot shake its need to control the rest of the planet in any way it can. They cannot shake off this colonial attitude."

Yorke: "The difference between me and Bono is that he's quite happy to go and flatter people to get what he wants and he's very good at it, but I just can't do it. ... In a way it would help if I could, but I just can't. I admire the fact that Bono can, and can walk away from it smelling of roses."

INFP

Morrissey

Singer-songwriter

Morrissey: "Age shouldn't affect you. It's just like the size of your shoes - they don't determine how you live your life!"

Morrissey: "I'm lying in my bed and I think about life and I think about death and neither one particularly appeals to me."

INFP

David Simon

Creator of 'The Wire'

Simon: "I am cynical about institutions but I am affectionate about people."

Simon: "Statistics always lie. ... Statistics can be made to say anything."

INFP

David Lynch

Filmmaker

Lynch: "It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings. ... Because the meaning is a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for someone else."

Lynch: "All my movies are about strange worlds that you can't go into unless you build them and film them. That's what's so important about film to me. I just like going into strange worlds."

Lynch: "I couldn't and wouldn't work in a studio if I didn't have final cut. ... How could anyone do that? Absolutely pure suicide. Sadness. Ridiculousness. ... Never in a million years. A person's voice is what's critical."

Lynch: "Spielberg is a very lucky human being, because the things he likes, millions and millions of people like. The things I like, maybe thousands and thousands of people like."

INFP

Terrence Malick

Filmmaker

Malick: "What I find patronizing is people ... stacking the deck for [other people], not respecting their integrity, their difference."

Malick: "When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in cliches. That doesn't make them laughable; it's something tender about them."

Edoardo Nolfo: "Terrence Malick loves innocence and anything that celebrates it."

Daily Telegraph: "He's the J.D. Salinger of the movie business."

INFP

Andy Warhol

Artist

Warhol: "I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do."

Warhol: "'In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.' I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, 'In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.'"

Warhol: "Being alive is so much work. ... Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep."

Warhol: "I've never met a person I couldn't call a beauty."

INFP

Teller

Magician, partner of Penn Jillette

Teller: "I live in my own little world ... hoping that every once in while, something really beautiful will gleam out like a penny in the sand. ... That's what I live for."

Teller: "My love of gothic ideas ... seems inborn; I loved Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' and Poe's short stories from the first page of them I turned."

Teller: "As a kid ... I cared about the dark side of things. I had no interest in comedy, I still don't. That's more Penn's thing."

Teller: "The thing I dislike most in magic is piracy. I know how many years can go into one beautiful idea. And to see somebody simply lift that idea (invariably doing it badly or insincerely) makes my blood boil."

Time Out: "[Penn and Teller] appear utterly incompatible: the tall shouty one who thinks and laughs; the small quiet one who feels and cries."

INFP

Louis C.K.

Stand-up comedian

Louis C.K.: "With movies, [what] I really loved [was] moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those."

Louis C.K.: "I never viewed money as being 'my money,' I always saw it as 'the money.' ... If it pools up around me then it needs to be flushed back out into the system."

Louis C.K.: "There's been a lot of simple vilification of right-wing people. It's really easy to say, ... 'You're anti-this and that, and I hate you.' But to me, it's more interesting to say, 'What is this person like and how do they really think?'"

Louis C.K.: "When I read [that] the foundations of capitalism are shattering, I'm like: 'Maybe we need that. Maybe we need some time where we're walking around with a donkey with pots clanging on the sides.'"

Stephen Deusner: "[He has a] genial stage presence, and a starkly honest style that blends relentless self-deprecation with a genuine sense of wonder at the world."

INFP

Jude Law

Actor

Law: "I honestly have no interest in celebrity whatsoever. If anything, I always cringe at it because it takes away from what I am."

Law: "I would never know how to sell myself as a sex symbol. That's not how I'm programmed."

Law: "It's a bit of a minefield being 20 because you've got all these aspirations and ideals. Well, I had."

Law: "I've always liked what Thomas More said in 'Utopia': ... Every person is allowed their own lifestyle ... but no one is allowed to stand on a soapbox and tell others that theirs is right. I thought that was brilliant."

INFP

Andrew Garfield

Actor, dating Emma Stone

Garfield: "I've always been sensitive and had difficulty containing my feelings."

Garfield: "I don't believe anyone is ugly."

[Asked what he would do if he were not an actor:]
Garfield: "A street clown? A juggler? That would be cool. ... I'd go wandering and get lost for a minute, like Jack Kerouac."

Garfield: "The thing I get out of [acting] is ... inhabiting the world [of] the role. ... If I can keep losing myself - and finding parts of myself ... then that's all I can really ask for."

Time Out: "He's a serious, self-effacing young man more interested in art than adulation."

INFP

Robert Pattinson

Actor, dating Kristen Stewart

[Asked if he was ready for his life to change:]
Pattinson: "I'm always ready for my life to change. I'm always waiting for it to change."

Pattinson: "I have a romantic soul."

Pattinson: "[Kristen Stewart] will decide [what she thinks of] someone a lot quicker [than I will]. ... She's like, 'You're an idiot and I don't want to talk to you,' [whereas] I'm like, 'I'm an idiot too!' So I'll talk to an idiot for days before deciding."

INFP

Mia Wasikowska

Actress

Wasikowska: "I definitely identify with [the characters I've played], and I really love them for the certain amount of outsider-ness about them."

[Asked about her hobby of photography:]
Wasikowska: "[With acting] you are relying on and waiting on other people. ... To have [another outlet] that I have full creative control over is really very therapeutic."

Wasikowska: "[I hated drama class] because it felt like ... it was for the loud, outgoing kids. ... But I don't think acting is really about that."

Wasikowska: "[I found Johnny Depp] easy to talk to."

INFP

Chloe Sevigny

Actress and fashion icon

Sevigny: "I feel like I was always embraced by fashion. Fashion embraces the weirdos."

Sevigny: "I never felt like an insider in Hollywood in any way, shape, or form. ... It's not really my world."

Sevigny: "I attract eccentrics."

The Guardian: "[She is noted for] her quirky looks [and] iconic sense of style."

INFP

Mary-Kate Olsen

Actress and fashion designer, sister of Ashley Olsen and Elizabeth Olsen

Olsen: "I would never wish my upbringing on anyone ... but I wouldn't take it back for the world."

Olsen: "[None of the] things [that people say about me] have anything to do with who I [really] am."

Olsen: "I think that creating different environments is an art in itself. ... Thinking of someone like Tim Burton and his films - he has had his own singular vision."

Olsen: "I'm not great at communicating my vision - I think I use fragments instead of full sentences. Or when I try to explain ... [it comes out] wrong."

INFP

Isabel Myers

Author of 'Gifts Differing' and developer of the Myers-Briggs typology

Myers: "[To say that] that thinking evaluates from the viewpoint 'true-false' and feeling from the viewpoint 'agreeable-disagreeable' ... [is a] a thinker's formulation. 'Agreeable' is too pale a word for the rich personal worth of Feeling."

Myers: "To thinking types, the idea of evaluating by means of feeling sounds flighty, unreliable, and uncontrolled, but thinkers are no judges of feeling. They naturally judge all feeling by their own, and theirs is relatively undeveloped and unreliable."

Myers: "Thinking types often contradict each other, each one claiming, 'This is truth.' The feeling type need only say, 'This is valuable to me.'"

INFP

Karen Horney

Psychoanalyst and author of 'Neurosis and Human Growth'

Horney: "The analyst must ... 'feel into' the patient [and have] a sensitivity to psychic undercurrents that is almost a sixth sense."

Horney: "In working with a patient the analyst has to project himself into a strange world, with its own peculiarities and its own laws."

Horney: "[We must be] clear as to what exactly are our values and act accordingly. It would constitute an essential lack of truth to ourselves if ... we relinquished our efforts to measure up to it."

Horney: "The idea of a finished human [being] not only appears presumptuous but even, in my opinion, lacks any strong appeal."

INFP

Margaret Mead

Anthropologist and author of 'Coming of Age in Samoa'

Mead: "We must [let] each diverse human gift ... find a fitting place."

Mead: "Ideally [every observation] should come ... as a surprise."

Mead: "When one treats what is new merely as a variant of something already known, this may lead one far astray."

INFP

Jane Goodall

Primatologist and conservationist

Goodall: "Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play."

Goodall: "The only way is to get into people's hearts. It's the only way. It doesn't work through the head."

Goodall: "[I wish] I could go back to living in the forest, which is what I love. But how can I go and live in the forest when it's disappearing?"

Goodall: "We need to change our greed and materialism. We need ... to realize that we need money to live, rather than to live for money."

Joseph Andriano: "Goodall was accused of ... anthropomorphism when she attributed personalities and motivations to chimpanzees."

INFP

J.D. Salinger

Author of 'The Catcher in the Rye'

Salinger: "There's a marvelous peace in not publishing. ... Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure."

[Asked why he wouldn't sell film rights:]
Salinger: "For me, the weight of [my] book is in the narrator's voice, the non-stop peculiarities of it, his ... asides ... his thoughts. He can't legitimately be separated from his own [voice]."

INFP

Frank Lloyd Wright

Architect

Wright: "[All] human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful, it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly."

Wright: "'Natural' is the last thing [people] would let you be if they could prevent it. ... That's why they ... make all these senseless rules [and] foolish regulations."

[When warned that he was marrying too young, without knowing enough women:]
Wright: "I tried to understand the 'danger.' I sat trying to imagine and couldn't. It seemed beautifully right to me not to have experimented."

INFP

H.P. Lovecraft

Author of 'The Call of Cthulhu'

Lovecraft: "I should write even if I were the only reader, for my aim is merely self-expression."

Lovecraft: "Pleasure to me is wonder - the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden."

Lovecraft: "No new horror can be more terrible than the torture of the daily commonplace."

Lovecraft: "The truly sensitive will never be more than a minority, because most persons ... simply have not the psychological equipment to feel [in] that way."

INFP

Harper Lee

Author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

Lee: "[A writer] writes not to communicate with other people, but to communicate more assuredly with himself. It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless."

Lee: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

Blake Allmendinger: "The best thing about Lee's writing is that she writes with compassion for all of her characters."

INFP

Vladimir Nabokov

Author of 'Lolita'

Nabokov: "I think like a genius [and] speak like a child."

[On the first moon landing:]
Nabokov: "Treading the soil of the moon gives one ... the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced. [So why] drag in such irrelevant matters as wasted dollars and power politics?"

INFP

James Joyce

Author of 'Ulysses'

Joyce: "Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality."

INFP

Haruki Murakami

Author of 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'

Murakami: "To me, a story means to put your feet in someone else's shoes. ... When you put your feet in them you look at the world through other people's eyes."

Murakami: "I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change."

Murakami: "I've been an outsider all [my life]. It's been kind of hard, but I like that way of living."

Murakami: "[Humans always form] groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way. It's ridiculous."

INFP

Orhan Pamuk

Author of 'Snow'

Pamuk: "[Writing] is ... inhabiting characters ... You imagine yourself into the shoes of these characters."

Pamuk: "I think the art of the novel is ... drawing a picture of [another] person's world."

Pamuk: "Although I was ... taught to cherish the community, I [have] an impulse to break away ... I need ... loneliness to make my imagination work."

INFP

Vincent van Gogh

Artist

Van Gogh: "Some good must come by clinging to [what is] right."

Van Gogh: "Aren't the wise ones, those who never do anything foolish, even more foolish?"

Van Gogh: "What a mystery life is; and love is a mystery within a mystery."

Van Gogh: "My existence is not without reason! I know that I could be a quite different person! ... There is something inside me, but what can it be?"

INFP

Ray Bradbury

Author of 'Fahrenheit 451'

Bradbury: "I'm going to have a t-shirt made that says, 'Stand at the top of the cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.'"

Bradbury: "My characters write [my] books. I don't write [my] books. All these characters come to me and say, 'Listen to me!' ... And I put it down. ... That's how I write. All these lovers surround me, and they love life, and they tell me about it."

Bradbury: "I became a writer ... to escape the hopelessness and despair of the real world and enter the world of hope I could create with my imagination."

John Blake: "He rejects [pigeonholing]. He dislikes labels of any kind."

Playboy: "Even at the age of 75, there's something childlike about Ray Bradbury."

INFP

Jacques Lacan

Philosopher and psychologist

Lacan: "People only ask questions when they already have the answer. This seems to me to severely limit the scope of the questions. Nevertheless it provides an opportunity to assess what the answer means to each individual. Obviously the answer differs for each person."

Lacan: "It is one's own ego that one loves in love, one's own ego made real."

Lacan: "Desire is sustained through its lack of satisfaction, and even its impossibility."

Lacan: "[Science] has engendered all sorts of ... gadgets. You are now, infinitely more than you think, subjects of instruments [such as the television] that are becoming the elements of your existence."

INFP

Simon Baron-Cohen

Psychologist and author, cousin of Sacha Baron Cohen

Baron-Cohen: "Many [scientists] are happy to focus on one problem, and study it from one discipline. But I ... take the broader approach and try to integrate from a range of different approaches and disciplines."

INFP

William Shakespeare

Playwright

Shakespeare: "To thine own self be true."

David Hume: "[Shakespeare] hits upon a striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted uniquely [to each] character ... as if by inspiration."

INFP

Hans Christian Andersen

Author of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' and 'The Ugly Duckling'

Andersen: "If you looked down to the bottom of my soul, you would understand fully the source of my longing and - pity me."

INFP

Sylvia Plath

Author of 'The Bell Jar'

Plath: "I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person."

INFP

Neil Gaiman

Author

Gaiman: "Everybody has a secret world inside of them. ... No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they've all got ... amazing worlds."

INFP

Peter Kingsley

Writer on Pre-Socratic philosophy

Kingsley: "One of the foundation stones of Western civilization, Western science, is the discipline of logic. There's nothing really more, if you like, materialistic you can get than the ... hard, hard rules of logic."

Kingsley: "I remember in college being forced to learn all these things they put up on the blackboard, these terrible symbols and squiggles. ... It's just so counterintuitive. It can be so harsh, this mental [regimen] - almost this butchery of the mind."

Kingsley: "Parmenides brought the laws of logic into existence. ... He was the father of Western logic."

INFP

Hans Fritzsche

Head of radio propaganda in Nazi Germany

Fritzsche: "Because my nature was completely strange to feelings of power, I always considered it a burden to decide on the fate of people - even such little things as whether they should be hired or discharged in my office."

Fritzsche: "I have suffered more than a human being should suffer."

Leon Goldensohn: "[At age 45 he] had a certain youthful, naive, suggestively adolescent quality."

Telford Taylor: "Of all the [Nuremberg] defendants, Fritzsche was the most susceptible to the trials' shocking moments. ... After the first showing of an atrocity film, he burst into tears."