“But how could he admire Joyce’s lengthy, libidinal ‘yes’ so fervently and end up saying ‘no’ to his own life? I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one’s erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”

“I suppose that a lifetime spent hiding one's erotic truth could have a cumulative renunciatory effect. Sexual shame is in itself a kind of death.”

“I am not ultimately interested in writing fiction. I can't make things up. Or rather, I can only make things up about things that have already happened.”

“Psychoanalytic insight, Miller seems to suggest, is itself a pathological symptom.”

“What would happen if we spoke the truth?”

“It was a vicious cycle, though. The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew.”

“I'd been upstaged, demoted from protagonist in my own drama to comic relief in my parents' tragedy”