“I'd rather be mad than feel pleasure.”

Regarding her second book, How to be a Domestic Goddess.
A woman of extremes (2001)

As quoted in "Constance Wu Doesn’t Want to Be Your “It” Girl" in Vulture https://www.vulture.com/2016/06/constance-wu-c-v-r.html

NPR World Cafe (June 18, 2008).

How to be happy though rich or poor (1930)

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 143

Source: Face the Fire

Act II, scene 1.
The Spanish Friar (1681)

1963 interview, used in The Century of the Self (2002)
Context: My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call "happiness." There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.