I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

I haven't done any translating for decades now. It's something I did when I was young.

I wrote Report from the Interior was that after I finished Winter Journal, I took a pause, and I realized there was more I wanted to say.

When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

You have to protect it too, you can't let just any stupid person take it and do something demoralizing with it. At the same time, I don't believe in being so rigid about controlling what happens either.

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

The truth of the story lies in the details.