I would prefer you not to say, "That was the most terribly written piece I've ever read." That would hurt me. But you don't think I'm the best person in the world? Well, alright.

If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all.

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.

Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It's much better if one simply does.

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.

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

People always tell me either A. you love him. B. you hate him. My usual answer? C. All of the above.