Another Mamet quote -- on being an "observer"

From the essay "On Paul Ickovic's Photographs" in Writing in Restaurants :

I have always felt that people look on me as an outcast -- that simple request for a cup of coffee elicits a slight tightening around the eyes.

I have always felt like an outsider; and I am sure that the suspicion that I perceive is the suspicion that I provoke by my great yearning to belong.

I would like to live a life free of constant self-examination -- a life which may be ruled by the processes of guilt, remorse, hope and anxiety, but one in which those processes themselves are not foremost in the mind.

I would like to belong to a world dedicated to creating, preserving, achieving, or simply getting by. But the world of the outsider, in which I have chosen to live, and in which I have trained myself to live, is based on none of those things. It is based on observation.

~ ~ ~

But for myself, I do not think this has been a choice on my part.

It is just the way I am constructed.