That's what a community is: taking for granted certain assumptions, not having to start from zero every time. This is no longer true.

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong and fruitful.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.