the translator, a lonely sort of acrobat, becomes confused in a labyrinth of paradox, or climbs a pyramid of dependent clauses and has to invent a way down from it in his own language.

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant:that Scotland has so few trees.

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

My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.

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 believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn't use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer's characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.