And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.

After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half.

And I finished college because I thought how much it would upset my parents if I didn't.

I was immediately smitten with an attraction to this culture, not in the sense of high culture but of the basic way people behaved towards one another.

My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris.

I think situations are more important than plot and character.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

I left Princeton, but I graduated Harvard, in 1952.

My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done.

It's true, I had an extremely delicious life, but that was my life at home, and perhaps because I was only a child, or for whatever reasons, I found the company of others, especially other boys, quite terrifying and upsetting.

When Niki and I moved to Paris, there was also the challenge of Paris, an extremely daunting city.

Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.

My dream, I remember, when I went to boarding school, was to have a study all my own, a little nook someplace where nobody could get at me - nobody, like the football coach.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And then I realized that what I really wanted to write had nothing to do with what he was doing.

I love teaching.

I graduated in 1952 and went to Europe, with Niki and our first child Laura, who was then a year old.

Well, my relationship to America at the time I left was very limited.

And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches.

What I wanted to do and what I needed to do was something entirely different, and through reading Roussel I learned that I could do what I wanted all on my own and that I didn't have to rely on what had actually happened in my somewhat limited life and reading.

What I said about John was that he liberated me from my anxieties about writing in a correct, acceptable way.

My Life in CIA is the first time that I've ever written a story in my own name.

I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better.

I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

A man is too apt to forget that in this world he cannot have everything. A choice is all that is left him.

Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing. It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

It is too maddening. I've got to fly off, right now, to some devilish navy yard, three hours in a seasick steamer, and after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak three times, and then I'll be sick coming home. Still, who would not be sick for England?

After the navy, I transferred to Harvard and finished there. I was there the spring term of 1951 and I stayed through the summer term and a whole other year, so I was able to do two years in a little less than a year and a half.

I received my parents' permission and went into the Navy on June 3, 1941.

I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.

No matter what happens, the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.

My uncle and my grandfather both worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Later on, there were some problems with our navy, so he made me the head of the navy - all things that I hardly knew anything about. I was basically an ignorant young man.

I wanted to further my education, so I went on to get a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and came back and served about ten years in the Canadian Navy as what we call a combat systems engineer.

I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.

My whole world before I joined the Navy was my neighborhood in the Bronx.

When I lost my rifle, the Army charged me 85 dollars. That is why in the Navy the Captain goes down with the ship.

The Marine Corps is the Navy's police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's.

I got called back into the Navy during the Korean War.

And then, when I went into the Navy, there was no choice. You took about half of the hours during your naval training as naval courses and the other half were engineering.

I stayed in the Navy until July of 1946.

To compel the nation with challenge the traditional American doctrine of freedom of the seas, every man and every ship in the navy is solemnly pledged.

I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for herself.

Before the BBC, I joined the Navy in order to travel.