I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.

It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.

I wish I had a typical workday. I struggle to get up at seven and almost always fail. I just try to get to my office as soon as I can, but it's always later than I would like.

In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person. So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her.

It's a hard thing to age a character because you can't really suddenly give someone gray hair.

I do sometimes miss doing that lighter, more humorous work, and I find there's a heavier responsibility that goes along with a literary reputation. You have to start knowing what you're talking about and you have to go have public conversations with writers. That's been pretty intense; I have to really stay on top of things in a way I didn't before.

I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.