What other people think of me is not really my major concern in life. What other people think of what I write is another matter.

I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules.

Many writers do write about their families and their immediate loved ones and love experiences, either as children or as adults. And very often people get offended by it.

Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.

Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion; worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.

I've told the same story twelve different ways, but I think that's just part of what writers do. Once may not be enough.

I have always been fascinated by the human mind, conscious and unconscious - that is what writing and reading is about, too. The why of your life and the why of your choices and the what has happened that you know and the what that you don't know is really riveting, and psychoanalysts share my wonder at how it all unfolds.