I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden.

Everything should be understood, and anything can be transformed - that is the modern view.

The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences.

I make an idol of my moral consciousness. My pursuit of the good is corrupted by the sin of idolatry.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.

The only transformation that interests me is a total transformation - however minute

...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.