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I have written symphonic poems and chamber music. It is my way of personal expression.

I'm a fan of many different styles of classical and symphonic music.

Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.

All these tales of people sitting down and composing symphonies just as though they were writing a letter are very much exaggerated; at least, it isn't that way in my work.

I became fascinated by the fact that you could translate written material into performance.

This is what I want in heaven... words to become notes and conversations to be symphonies.

I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.

I've always felt, even as a songwriter, that the rhythm of speech is in itself a language for me.