Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart. Heart is so new to this. I want them back, says heart. Head is all heart has. Help, head. Help heart.

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

I find teaching - I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.

Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.

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.

I would recommend, definitely, developing a 'day job' that you like - don't expect to make money writing!

The translator ... Peculiar outcast, ghost in the world of literature, recreating in another form something already created, creating and not creating, writing words that are his own and not his own, writing a work not original to him, composing with utmost pains and without recognition of his pains or the fact that the composition really is his own.