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.

Friendship needs both confidences and confidence in the other's outstretched hand.

However, there probably is a slight connection between the high-wire, super sensitivity, open to everything and too much, and slightly fragile soul of the artist and the need to self-medicate, which can lead to bad trouble either in drugs, or alcohol. So it's not that there's no connection, it's just that we can't make too much of it because it isn't the addiction that's the issue, it's the fragility of some people who do artistic work, who end up in rehab somewhere or other.

Our mythology tells us so much about fathers and sons. ... What do we know about mothers and daughters? ... Our power is so oblique, so hidden, so ethereal a matter, that we rarely struggle with our daughters over actual kingdoms or corporate shares. On the other hand, our attractiveness dries as theirs blooms, our journey shortens just as theirs begins. We too must be afraid and awed and amazed that we cannot live forever and that our replacements are eager for their turn, indifferent to our wishes, ready to leave us behind.

It's true, we tend to write about the same thing over and over again because this is our trauma. If I had been in World War II, I might have been writing about D-Day over and over again.

People always think their world is coming to an end if they're exposed, and of course it isn't coming to an end; it goes right on exactly the way it always was.

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.