I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.

a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm

Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear.

As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.

Oh, all you immigrants and visionaries, what do you hope to find here, who do you hope to become?

Remember, how often the great art of the past didn't look great at first, how often it didn't look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it's still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that's survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.