“A fallow mind is a field of discontent.”

“...my heart is a desolate field over which geese vee, the sky turns and the days lie fallow...”

“Only fools and dead men don't change their minds. Fools won't and dead men can't.”

“Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues.”

“She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.”

“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”

“I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper. Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire. But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire. It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work. The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.”