"Maybe writing is never anything else but translation—ultimately, a translation which cannot be identified."1
"I've always been as much inspired by poets as by fiction writers, and in fact my reading Roussel enabled me to write prose as if it were poetry."2
"Americans are usually very upset when you start talking about literature as words being organized the way you can organize musical notes without reference to anything outside them. ... but ultimately I think only Americans could understand what I'm doing."3
"What matters in writing, as in music, is what's going on between the words (and between the notes); the movement is what matters, rather than whatever is being said."4
"I think the aim is to write for pleasure even if you're writing about concentration camps and the black death; and the pleasure one imagines is the reader's pleasure."5
"All books come from other books, especially when they're drawn from real life."6
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1 Interview with Lynne Tillman, Bomb, Winter 1988/98 2 Interview with Michael Friedman, Shiny, Spring 1986 3 Interview with Meyer Raphael Rubinstein, Silo, 1978 4 Interview with John Ashbery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1987 5,6 Interview with John Ash, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1987
