I am basically the sort of person who has stage-fright teaching. I kind of creep into a classroom. I'm not an anecdote-teller, either, although I often wish I were.

I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.

Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I'm going on. You need at least two brains to write.

If you think of something, do it. Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.

When I'm trying a new form- trying to do something I'm not used to doing, which was true of the novel.

In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle - 'I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me' - a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too.

I am basically the sort of person who has stage-fright teaching. I kind of creep into a classroom. I'm not an anecdote-teller, either, although I often wish I were.