I am not for any form of repression, but I sometimes think the desire for liberation masks the desire for oblivion. It's very hard to tell the difference sometimes.

I think men are still very loath to talk about their sexuality. Yet, I am so ashamed about my imperfection as a human being that I tell everything.

All writers are autobiographical to a degree and writing about the nature of their inner life. My inner life has always been a struggle between my conception of myself and the world versus reality.

I haven't had a drink for 24 and a half years, so I don't live the kind of life anymore where I literally take mind altering substances, or do things in which I am able to forgo reality. I have the potential to be an enormously repressed individual in the guise of a freewheeling spirit.

Brazil obviously connotes something in my mind to do with desire, sexuality and freedom. In fantasy, in mythology, Rio is the iconography of the imagination. In essence, we're all sex tourists. I've never been to Rio and I've never been to a psychoanalytic convention, but in a sense, Rio is symbolic of desire, some sort of ultimate ecstasy.

I was in analysis for many years, and one of the things analysis does is open up forbidden territories. It opens up those unconscious, instinctual urges that you then have to deal with. I'm like a Frankenstein of analysis. I'm able to go back and forth between the world I've created inside of myself and the real world, which is something I think a lot of people who write and paint and make art do.

Can we come to the point where we can accept the impossible strivings that we have, the utter inability to ever fulfill our narcissistic megalomania, and then go on to live our lives and accept our disturbing thoughts? We need to accept our vulnerabilities and have love for our imperfections. If you can want what you have, I think you're on your way.