I have two writer daughters, and a psychoanalyst daughter, and a lawyer daughter, and they wish we didn't write, I'm sure, but we write. If we were a painting family, we would paint.

You can be creative and not addictive, or addictive and not creative. Most addicted people do not produce anything of remarkable note.

I am not a perfect friend, and it is impossible not to rebuff or be rebuffed if you move about the world.

I really consider myself a writer, and a writer who is sometimes a social critic. I'm not an ideologue, I don't join a party. I follow along and take notes. Sometimes I throw in my two cents.

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

Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people.

You really can't say things that upset someone in print and expect them to be nice and leave you their money. That's just not reasonable.