All writers are autobiographical to a degree and writing about the nature of their inner life. My inner life has always been a struggle between my conception of myself and the world versus reality.

Brazil obviously connotes something in my mind to do with desire, sexuality and freedom. In fantasy, in mythology, Rio is the iconography of the imagination. In essence, we're all sex tourists. I've never been to Rio and I've never been to a psychoanalytic convention, but in a sense, Rio is symbolic of desire, some sort of ultimate ecstasy.

I haven't had a drink for 24 and a half years, so I don't live the kind of life anymore where I literally take mind altering substances, or do things in which I am able to forgo reality. I have the potential to be an enormously repressed individual in the guise of a freewheeling spirit.

Imagination is always greater than reality, and the reality of a sex paradise is that they offer a supposed escape from the nightmare of repressive society.