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.

My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me - nobody, like the football coach.

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.

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 left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.

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