I'm telling a Richard Pryor story through me.
I haven't sworn off Facebook. I'm on Facebook. There's a fan page on Facebook that I will update, but I'm on there myself under a pseudonym, because there were a lot of people able to private-message me on Facebook, and it was getting really weird.
I used to have a pseudonym for Twitter, and I'm trying to get my check to verify me.
The decision to use a pen name was nothing more than a desire to compartmentalise my life. However, I had not thought about an appropriate pseudonym, and since there's an abundance of anagrams in the novel, the idea struck me: why not use an anagram of my name? Hence, Shawn Haigins.
While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
I use a pseudonym, because my real name is very difficult to pronounce, to remember, and to spell. And many people who have been talking about me on television have yet to pronounce it correctly.
You play with the audience, and they play back with you. They get into it, and then everybody gets into it. I don't want to be like a monkey on stage and just go through the motions because then it wouldn't be fun anymore. I just pay attention to the audience and appreciate the fact that somebody wants to see us. That gets me psyched.
I always feel like I wasn't the best trainer, because I'm really good at teaching people stuff, but I'm not good if people aren't super psyched - if they're not like me.
I showed my mom the movie then I told her the movie got bought and that it was gonna be shown in theatres and be on video. Everyone was really psyched about it. Everyone in my little town of hounds started to call me movie star.
All of a sudden Kevin told me that the movie got bought and was gonna be shown in a movie theatre. I was shocked. I was psyched. It was just weird.
I've always argued that all Tame Impala melodies are pure pop. It's just that 'Lonerism,' for example, is a completely rumbling, fuzzed out psychedelic rock album. But for me, it was just pop music produced the way that I like to produce it.
And I also felt that no one in an audience could abuse me worse than the sort of abuse I had had at work as a psychiatric nurse.
My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story.
If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.
My mother sent me to psychiatrists since the age of four because she didn't think little boys should be sad. When my brother was born, I stared out the window for days. Can you imagine that?
'American Psycho' is violent. 'Apocalypse Now' is violent. 'Officer Downe' is a comic and not violent to me.
All along, I've been writing about our fears, our longings, our fantasies, our ambivalences. When I decided to study psychoanalysis, I did it because I wanted to understand the psychodynamics of it all. Though far from perfect, psychoanalysis offered me a huge, wonderful window on all that.
The thing that gave me the most pain in life, psychologically, and it gave me tremendous pain psychologically, is man's disrespect for nature.
The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world.
Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.
