“I envy people meeting me for the first time,” he said. “That first meeting is everything, because I can watch their eyes and see it all happen, and I want to be them. I want to meet somebody like me.”

“What I do,” she said, “is, as soon as I know they’re devoted, I start to find fault with them. It’s not that I find fault with them, really. It’s the Sleeping Giant in my system who wakes up with a ‘Fe Fi Fo Fum!’ and says, ‘Yecchh! Look at that hair.’ Or, ‘Oh my God, did you hear the stupid thing he said?’ The Sleeping Giant who knows no pity is hungry for faults, he hunts them like Easter eggs. But the Giant does this. I like them. I feel bad that the Giant is gonna do it. There’s something in me that wants to warn them, ‘Please don’t be stupid,’ like people can help it. And then the Giant says, ‘He’s not good enough.’ And the thing is, I truly—the Sleeping Giant doesn’t—but I truly care about people. Now, sometimes I don’t show compassion but, I mean, I walk around with it. I’m devastated when teams lose in sports. I want to kill myself when they show the faces of the losing team. I know how it feels. I mean, I can barely squash bugs unless I feel directly threatened.”

“My problem is, I only know how to need needy people,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to recognize somebody who was all right. They could be wearing a sign, ‘I have no problems, you can believe me,’ and I wouldn’t even see them.”

“The only way to become intimate for me is repeated exposure,” she said. “My route to intimacy is routine. I establish a pattern with somebody, and then I notice when they’re not there. Once you get this routine thing going, you have to take a lot of vacations, so there’s a constant renewal or harking back. When you see them, it’s like your favorite song that was number one that you almost got sick of. It’s been off the radio for a while, and then you hear it one day and it’s like, ‘Oh, greeaatt! How great to hear this again!’ That’s people for me.”

“To me, it’s finding yourself in everybody,” he said. “But not enough of you to stay with any one person. There’s so much of yourself, you’re so many-sided. I had a guy in India come up to me on his skateboard and say, ‘My brother, my brother.’ It haunted me that he called me his brother, and then I thought, ‘Yes. Yes! I see that, of course.’ And so if I can find me in a leper . . . I’m looking for myself and I find me everywhere. Just not enough to make a difference.”