Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed. There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules.

What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can't hurt and you might get better.

I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.

The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.