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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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