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

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

And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didnt.

There are many things I’ve written that I didn’t really understand until a long time later.

What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.

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

After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half.