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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.