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" Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead. "

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" You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it's not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer. "

" Everything can change at any moment, suddenly and forever. "

" I like the sound a typewriter makes. "

" I'm not a man deeply interested in technology. It eludes me. "

" Our lifelong certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. "

" I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it. "

" I'm living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future. "

" 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. "

" With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process. "

" Children, I mean, think of your own childhood, how important the bedtime story was. How important these imaginary experiences were for you. They helped shape reality, and I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction. "

" 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. "

" If you're not ready for everything, you're not ready for anything. "

" It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. "

" Changing your mind is probably one of the most beautiful things people can do. And I've changed my mind about a lot of things over the years. "

" We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence. "

" For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity. "

" You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky. "

" I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went. "

" I've always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil - especially for corrections. "

" 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. "

" The human body is strange and flawed and unpredictable. The human body has many secrets, and it does not divulge them to anyone, except those who have learned to wait. "

" What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it's quite literally that. "

" The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we're not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence. "

" It's extremely difficult to get these jobs because you can't get a job on a ship unless you have seaman's paper's, and you can't get seaman's papers unless you have a job on a ship. There had to be a way to break through the circle, and he was the one who arranged it for me. "