Novelist

Every time the DSM prepares for a new edition, there are countless groups lobbying to get their particular mental illness recognized by the diagnostic manual. Surely, this is a social and cultural phenomenon.

I have suffered from migraines since childhood and have long been curious about my own aching head, my dizziness, my divine lifting feelings, my sparklers and black holes, and my single visual hallucination of a little pink man and a pink ox on the floor of my bedroom.

I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist.

Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments.

The third-person or 'objective,' static, reductive models used in most science are important and yield significant results, but they have their limitations.

Both depression and anxiety disorders, for example, are repeatedly described in the media as 'chemical imbalances in the brain,' as if spontaneous neural events with no relation to anything outside a person's brain cause depression and anxiety.

I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.

Creativity has always depended on openness and flexibility, so let us hope for more of both in the future.

I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980.

I like 'nerves'! I like the word 'migraineur'. I like the word 'madness'. These are OK words. The 19th century had a very handy term: 'neurasthenic'. I think that's a very useful word. We all know what that means: it means extra-sensitive.

Scientists have a tendency to believe in absolutes, in studies and the repeating of them. Psychoanalysis is firmly based in subjective accounts. We need both.

Having children is one of the most passionate and involving bits of business in human life.

While reading 'David Copperfield' in the middle of the night - probably because of the light, I had insomnia for the first time - I looked out of the window and thought, 'If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do.'

Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.

Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.

The English expression 'to fall asleep' is apt because the transition between waking and sleeping is a gradual drop from one state of being into another: a giving up of full self-consciousness for unconsciousness or for the altered consciousness of dreams.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.

I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia, I have sometimes slept without knowing it.

That's one of the great lies of intimacy, to pretend you know everything - you cannot. No matter how close you've been, over however many years, there remain secrets. I think we all know that - that you don't tell everybody everything.