I often need physical gesture to balance dialogue. If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

I suppose it’s comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse things to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.

I need to rebel against myself. It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear.

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

Sundays tend to be a day where just I do nothing but visit people. It's kind of like trick-or-treating.

When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.