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

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.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.

Art is not in some far-off place.

So the question really is, Why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.

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

If I was writing about an academic or a more difficult person, I would use the Latinate vocabulary more, but I do think Anglo-saxon is the language of emotion.