Because here’s another sneaky little truth about life. You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.

The first step to being more attractive is to see rejection as a means to eliminate women who won't make you happy from your life. It's a blessing, not a curse.

Be pretty, but not threateningly pretty. Be a go-getter but don't threaten anyone or be a bitch. Caught in this web of contradictions, we have to be everything for everyone and we lose the ability to explore who we really are.

Putting yourself in a position where you can be rejected, saying a joke that may not be funny, asserting an opinion that may offend others, joining a table of people you don’t know, telling a woman that you like her and want to date her. All of these things require you to stick your neck out on the line emotionally in some way. You’re making yourself vulnerable when you do them.

In this way, vulnerability represents a form of power, a deep and subtle form of power.

Some women tend to bring insults into a little show you put forth to make them laugh, but they later accuse you of some abnormality if you keep them at arms length in order to regain your respect.

The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.

Controversial' as we all know, is often a euphemism for 'interesting and intelligent.

The key to such power is ambiguity. In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine.

A lot of people try to counteract the ‘I am not good enough’ with ‘I am good enough.’ In other words, they take the opposite and they try to invest it. That still keeps the world at the level of polarities. The art is to go behind the polarities. So the act is to go not to the world of: ‘I am good’ to counteract ‘I am bad,’ Or ‘I am lovable’ as opposed to ‘I am unlovable.’ But go behind it to ‘I am.’ I am. I am. And ‘I am’ includes the fact that I do crappy things, and I do beautiful things. And I am.

In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive.

Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing. Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion. Stand out. Be conspicuous, at all cost. Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious than the bland and timid masses.

A joke I used to repeat in those days was: Why be happy when you can be interesting? I knew how to be interesting. There was power in being a spectacle, even a miserable spectacle. The punch and the line. Interesting: sentences like serrated blades, laughter like machine-gun rounds, a drink in one hand, a borrowed cigarette in the other. If you could draw enough glances, any room could orbit around you.

"I think there's a difference between (a) offending people for its own sake, which I don't necessarily want to do, because some people are good and decent and it would be unkind to upset them simply to indulge my own self-importance, and (b) challenging their prejudices, their preconceptions, or their comfortable assumptions. I'm very happy to do that. But we need to be on our guard when people say they're offended. No one actually has the right to go through life without being offended. Some people think they can say "such-and-such offends me" and that will stop the "offensive" words or behaviour and force the "offender" to apologise. I'm very much against that tactic. No one should be able to shut down discussion by making their feelings more important than the search for truth. If such people are offended, they should put up with it."

What gives you the right. Yes. To speak to a woman in your private … Yes. Yes. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You feel yourself empowered … you say so yourself. To strut. To posture. To “perform.” To “Call me in here …” Eh? You say that higher education is a joke. And treat it as such, you treat it as such. And confess to a taste to play the Patriarch in your class. To grant this. To deny that. To embrace your students.