This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcende nce.

Writing is a little door. Some fantasies, like big pieces of furniture, won’t come through.

In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

Along with people who pretty themselves for the camera, the unattractive and the disaffected have been assigned their beauty.

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