The privileged classes can afford psychoanalysis and whiskey. Whereas all we get is sermons and sour wine. This is manifestly unfair. I protest, silently.

The self cannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted.

The much heaves and palpitates. It is multidirectional and has a mayor.

There's not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there.

And I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love.

Faint equivalents can sometimes be found ... . Or it can be rendered obliquely-an adolescent's mental image of his or her parents making love, which must be something on the order of crocodiles mating.

Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.