So first of all I find myself in front of a terra incognita from the point of view of creative process. Secondly, I don't know what music does to me. I know it does everything to me. In my books I've often spoken of the opening of Edith Piaf's “Non, je ne regrette rien.” I go cold, I go hot, I'd vote for Monsieur Le Pen, I'd join the Foreign Legion. All sorts of magnificently irrational things follow on those opening bars for me. We know what music does to temperament. Plato suspected it of being too dangerously powerful. We know its uses in medicine, in therapy. What does music do inside us? What is it that responds?

But I've had other masters. Mr. Whittaker, of the original New Yorker, whose nickname was Mr. Frimbo, was my editor for the first twenty years there. Mr. Whittaker regarded an imprecision, of syntax or punctuation, as being dirty in an almost moral sense. If a sentence wasn't absolutely precise, if it waffled, if you put a colon where there should have been a semicolon, you were doing dirt: on your reader, on the language and ultimately on yourself. This could lead to transatlantic calls which you simply wouldn't believe. He would say, “Mr. Steiner” — always Mr., of course — “I think what you really meant was . . .” And you'd say, “Well that's what it says,” and he'd say, “No, no, not quite. Will you listen to it again?” And he'd read it again, and gradually you would realize that he was right, that it wasn't exactly what it said. Now that kind of love for the resources of the English language, for the inexhaustible nuance of English punctuation, is extraordinary. Mr. Whittaker was a superb teacher, and so was Mr. Shawn, whose care over detail became a legend in his lifetime. Those were true teachers to work with in harness.

I'm also wild about mountains, hence my joy living for twenty years in Switzerland and my keeping a base there now: to walk among the hills, just to walk, to look. Another difference perhaps from the democratic instincts of the United States is that I'm not a marine creature, a lover of the democracy of beaches. Mountains are harsh selectors. The higher you pant your way, the fewer you will meet. Solitude is, surely, the test. Is one worth living with (oneself)? In a way I am unable to formulate, even the final depths of love, of intercourse, find one alone. As will death. Consumer societies and egalitarian utopias have tried to efface this fact. To me, it has always seemed obvious. Death will, I sense, be interesting. It is not, I suspect, an interest to be shared.

I used to write stories that had lakes, that had deep blue waters shelled by the sky; water mucky and full of disease; I wrote stories where people used to break down and cry unbidden, unprovoked, just because of the way a stone looked when it was wet, or the way the wind ruffled the grass; the people in those stories might jump to violence unprovoked; they wore teal windbreakers and rolled packs of cigarettes into their T-shirts; some swore up and down to God Almighty and drank slugs from tail-boy beer cans (those were the same ones who might kick a mutt unprovoked, even kill it, the sharp snap of a dog’s jaw breaking, the sound of a wooden chopstick being pried apart). I had characters who walked alone in dust-moted houses, plains pressing like gaping mouths against the windows, while they considered how to cope with abuses; furnaces popped on in basements, and there was always the sickly smell of fuel oil that saturated everything. I used to produce characters, American loners, who kicked walls and acted in deranged ways. I used to write with a raw, tight-lipped wonder at the way some folks stood their isolation on end and made long lazy afternoons into festivals of despair and desperation. And I never wondered where a story was going because it was always going to the same place, that little plot of land on the lake, lifting high with yellow weeds, and the smell of lighter fluid starting a barbecue next door where things were better and people partied with the kind of gusto that stunned, destroyed, obliterated; boats crashed on the lake in the dark, folks lost arms and limbs, yet in the morning light rising over the flat dead water there was always some solace; a flank of geese wedging south, the end of summer, some russet colors to the leaves, the seasons making headway; for in my stories there was always that much, at least, to go on. In some of these stories the smell of pine sap prevailed and there were stony backgrounds; nights were long and cold and characters rolled in discomfort; some of these cold folks wore double socks and rubbed their hands together frantically trying to generate enough friction, as if they hoped to start a fire of their own flesh. Others felt the cold steel of a snub-nosed gun against their inside waistband, or the fine edge of a carbon blade as it came out of leather, knowing damn well I’d make use of that later because no matter what, they bowed to me and to me only when it came down to endings and resolutions and those swooping lines that plots are supposed to draw. And if the grace of God came into things it was stupid luck, blind luck, a car pulling to the shoulder in time.

[...] That’s the feeling in the air as she stands and looks out over the water during what will become the last ten minutes of her life not only as a character but as a soul because she’s mine and my soul, and not only did I make her but she made me—she gets, standing there, that feeling you get in the summer on hot, hot days, of impending evening, a feeling that rises up shortly after two o’clock when the sun, having reached its summer zenith, begins the slow descent into the pines and maples and ragweeds tearing up the edge of the land; the vacant lot behind the cottage seething with dry brittle sounds; fences that lead nowhere. Her body is long and sleek and in a way has reached a zenith (the extra two pounds aside) of perfection that she is aware of fully; she feels hairless and slick and ready to slide into the water, to slip into it, soundlessly, to become part of it; her legs are long and (Tony says) fine, shaved smooth just the night before, oiled down. She ran the flat of her palm along the top of her leg amazed at the sharpness of it; then, straightening herself, she pressed her arms flat to the sides of her thighs, lifted up onto her toes, considered her trajectory and the depth of the lake at the end of the dock, and, out of my control, launched herself into the horizon.

[...] In the stories I used to write the ending would be neither happy nor sad; you’d be driven to go back for clues, for gentle hints of her future; you’d be the soothsayer, the story, the crystal ball, no word out of place.

Of course I thought I was Jo in Little Women. But I didn’t want to write what Jo wrote. Then in Martin Eden I found a writer-protagonist with whose writing I could identify, so then I wanted to be Martin Eden—minus, of course, the dreary fate Jack London gives him. I saw myself as (I guess I was) a heroic autodidact. I looked forward to the struggle of the writing life. I thought of being a writer as a heroic vocation.

[...]

Later, when I was thirteen, I read the journals of André Gide, which described a life of great privilege and relentless avidity.

Reading—which is rarely related to what I’m writing, or hoping to write. I read a lot of art history, architectural history, musicology, academic books on many subjects. And poetry. Getting started is partly stalling, stalling by way of reading and of listening to music, which energizes me and also makes me restless. Feeling guilty about not writing.

[...]

I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It’s a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I’m too interested in many other things.

Well, it does educate us about life. I wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it not for certain books. I’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

Whenever I avow to being influenced, I’m never sure I’m telling the truth. But here goes. I think I learned a lot about punctuation and speed from Donald Barthelme, about adjectives and sentence rhythms from Elizabeth Hardwick. I don’t know if I learned from Nabokov and Thomas Bernhard, but their incomparable books help me keep my standards for myself as severe as they ought to be. And Godard—Godard has been a major nourishment to my sensibility and therefore, inevitably, to my writing. And I’ve certainly learned something as a writer from the way Schnabel plays Beethoven, Glenn Gould plays Bach, and Mitsuko Uchida plays Mozart.