The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry – actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.
If the world weren’t such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics.
What better portrait of a writer than to show a man who has been bewitched by books?
There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don’t know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It’s only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.
No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.
All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
I write the paragraph, then I’m crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it’s almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.
I’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just – the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects.
Movies are not novels, and that’s why, when filmmakers try to adapt novels, particularly long or complex novels, the result is almost always failure. It can’t be done.
My characters, I find them as I’m writing. It’s quite incredible how fully realized they are in my mind, how many details I know about each of them.
Those of us who can remember our childhoods will recall how ardently we relished the moment of the bedtime story, when our mother or father would sit down beside us in the semi-dark and read from a book of fairy tales.
We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.
I don’t think about the stories so much, as the characters themselves. They live on, and they are almost as real as I am.
Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
I was very moved to see that the name of the boat was Hamlet – an imaginary character becomes so important to people, we think about them so much that we name a ship after them. The imaginary lives on in the real.
I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.
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.
You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.