“I would write, Dear Diary, Today I convinced myself it's ok to give up. Stick with the status quo, now just isn't the time. But my reasons aren't reasons, they're excuses and the truth is, I'm scared Stefan. I'm scared that if I let myself be happy for one minute, that the my world's going to come crashing down and I don't know if I'll be able to survive that.”

“Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger... To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing.”

“But I don't know how to tell him all this. That I'm scared and I don't know how to be normal. I'm broken, just like him, and I'm not sure I can fix myself.”

“Little pinpricks fire-cracker up and down my body. Just calm down, I tell myself. You just make her nervous showing up all out of the blue like that. Still, I'm flattered that I matter-- even if it's just enough to scare her.”

“For a long time now I haven't existed. I'm utterly calm. No one distinguishes me from who I am. I just felt myself breath as if I'd done something new, or done it late. I'm beginning to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up to myself and resume the course of my existence. I don't know if that will make more happy or less. I don't know anything.”

“Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.”