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

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.

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.

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.

It’s true, I had an extremely delicious life, but that was my life at home, and perhaps because I was only a child, or for whatever reasons, I found the company of others, especially other boys, quite terrifying and upsetting.

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