“The waking consciousness, dear friends, is not the ego. The ego is only that portion of the waking consciousness that deals with physical manipulation.”

Source: The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971

Session 283, Page 18
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 7

"Man's Glassy Essence" in The Monist, Vol. III, No. 1 (October 1892)
Context: The consciousness of a general idea has a certain "unity of the ego" in it, which is identical when it passes from one mind to another. It is, therefore, quite analogous to a person, and indeed, a person is only a particular kind of general idea.

John Cheever, in George Plimpton (ed.) Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Fifth Series (New York: Penguin, 1981) p. 121.
Criticism

Buddhism : The Religion of No-Religion
Context: Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word "water" is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

Alan Watts Teaches Meditation (1992)

Variant: Expansion to your ego, friend.
-At your expense.

Source: On Divination and Synchronicity (1992), pp. 39-40

Playboy interview (May 1995)
Context: The fact is, you get great art only from mutilated egos. Only mutilated egos are obsessive enough. When I entered graduate school in 1968, 1 thought women were going to have all these enormous achievements, that they would redo everything. Then I saw every one of my female friends — these great minds who were going to transform the world — get married, move because their husbands moved and have babies. I screamed at them: What are you doing? Finish your great book! But they all read me the riot act. They said, "Camille, we are not you." They said, "We want life. We want love. We want happiness. We are not happy — like you are — just living off ideas." I am weird.