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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.