There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.
At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.
Do what you want to do, and don’t worry if it’s a little odd or doesn’t fit the market.
Like a tropical storm, I, too, may one day become ’better organized.
That’s the interesting thing about writing. You can start late, you can be ignorant of things, and yet, if you work hard and pay attention you can do a good job of it.
I do see an interest in writing for Twitter. While publishers still do love the novel and people do still like to sink into one, the very quick form is appealing because of the pace of life.
I don’t pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it.
The style developed over decades, really, but I started out writing pretty traditional stories, then became impatient. It was a writer named Russell Edson who showed me that one could write in any way at all.
My stories are sometimes closer to poems or meditations, but often there is at least a little narrative in them.
I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating ‘Swann’s Way.’ There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn’t want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust’s very long sentences.
I am basically the sort of person who has stage-fright teaching. I kind of creep into a classroom. I’m not an anecdote-teller, either, although I often wish I were.
I started with small-press publishers, who were willing to publish all sorts of forms. I didn’t move to the larger presses until they knew what they were getting in for.
Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn’t occur to people – or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.
In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle – ‘I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me’ – a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too...
Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I’m going on. You need at least two brains to write.
If I was writing about an academic or a more difficult person, I would use the Latinate vocabulary more, but I do think Anglo-saxon is the language of emotion.
I find teaching – I like it, but I find just walking into the classroom and facing the students very difficult.
When I’m trying a new form- trying to do something I’m not used to doing, which was true of the novel.
I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, and I don’t like to knock other writers as a matter of principle.