Translation Is Not A Matter Of Words

The Aura Of The Theocratic Death Penalty For Adultery Still Clings To America, Even Outside New England, And Multiple Divorce, Which Looks To The European Like Serial Polygamy, Is The Moral Solution To The Problem Of The Itch. Love Comes Into It Too, Of Course, But In Europe We Tend To See Marital Love As An Eternity Which Encompasses Hate And Also Indifference: When We Promise To Love We Really Mean That We Promise To Honor A Contract. Americans, Seeming To Take Marriage With Not Enough Seriousness, Are Really Taking Love And Sex With Too Much.

We Only Need To Wear Shoes Because The British Built Roads Which Hurt Our Feet.

Immortality Makes Sense Only When The Individual Soul Can Be Thought Of As Merging Into A Great Collective Mush Of Sainthood. If We Take Anything With Us Into The Next World, It Is Not What Survives In The Memories Of Our Relicts.

One Goes On Writing Partly Because It Is The Only Available Way Of Earning A Living. It Is A Hard Way And Highly Competitive. My Heart Drops Into My Bowels When I Enter A Bookshop And See How Fierce The Competition Is...there Is Also A Privier Reason For Pushing On, And That Is The Hopeless Hope That Someday That Intractable Enemy Language Will Yield To The Struggle To Control It... Mastery Never Comes, And One Serves A Lifelong Apprenticeship. The Writer Cannot Retire From The Battle; He Dies Fighting.

We Can Destroy What We Have Written, But We Cannot Unwrite It.