He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist's success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself… Freud… studied his own dreams not because he was a narcissist, but because he was a student of dreams. And whose were at once the least and most accessible of dreams, if not his own?

Novels, 1973-1977 (ed. 2006)