i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.

You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.

I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.