Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.

You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.

If the body is a temple, then tattoos are its stained glass windows.

What is so real as the cry of a child?

I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions.

So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.

Is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color—it’s a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown . . . I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.