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

Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.

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

I think situations are more important than plot and character.

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

Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing.... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.

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.