"Community" came to be seen as a chat-group: you switch on as long as your pleasure lasts, then push another button and switch off. Very easy to go in and out, join and leave.

Now people are worried not about the prospects of buying new things, but about how to pay for the things they bought yesterday, a year ago or years before. It is, as Americans like to say, "a wholly different kind of ball-game".

We belong to talking, not what talking is about... Stop talking - and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.

Unlike 'real relationships', 'virtual relationships' are easy to enter and to exit. They look smart and clean, feel easy to use, when compared with the heavy, slow-moving, messy real stuff.

Most young people today prefer just to move in together and stay together as long, but no longer, as satisfaction lasts.

Never paint epic canvases during the revolution, because the revolutionaries will tear them apart.

The art of walking on quicksand is still beyond me. What I learned is only how difficult this art is to master and how hard people need to struggle to learn it.