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

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.

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

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.

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

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.