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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Imagination is always greater than reality, and the reality of a sex paradise is that they offer a supposed escape from the nightmare of repressive society.

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.