It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who'd introduced them didn't much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

She took a sort of abject pride in her mecilessness toward herself.

Keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses - places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.

You are what you love. No? You are, completely and only, what you would die for without, as you say, the thinking twice.

There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.

Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.