I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris.

You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.

Write about the things that attract you. Choose your subjects the way you used to choose your toys: out of desire.

I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better.

I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.