The artist’s experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.

I know if I am not feeling that level of intensity when I am writing (with what I am writing) that I am just phoning it in. When I do work that I feel has some courage and life and fire in it, I feel the same level of vulnerability writing that I feel as when I am making love.