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I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write - with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.

When I need a word and do not find it in French, I select it from other tongues, and the reader has either to understand or translate me. Such is my fate.

The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can't read.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.

I want to go to a country where I don't speak the language. I want to be lost in translation.

I am really looking for a chance to direct. I feel like that's kind of the next frontier for me. I know that it's really hard to do, but I feel like I want to have a chance to try and translate something I've written and try and get a tone across.