Good writers are an editor's stock in trade (...) You have to treasure them and treat them right. - William Rodarmor

The sex scenes were the toughest to translate. Sex is notoriously hard to write about, and no easier to translate. My prose probably falls somewhere between puritanical and pornographic. Maybe sex is just better in French.

Translating a big book is like getting married: You’re going to spend a long time together. You may put in months weighing each word, often more carefully than the author."

(Speaking about his translation work of a diary by Berthe Weill) When it comes to typographical style, Berthe Weill is happily inimitable. She doesn't waste time on line breaks, so passages with a lot of dialogue look like sheets of mud. And she never met an ellipsis she didn't like. French writers use ellipses fairly often, but we avoid them in English because they... look vague... In my early drafts, I eliminated most of the ellipses, but I restored many of them later. That's because Weill's prose rhythm is closer to Machine Gun Kelly than Marcel Proust, and I realized that the ellipses help smoooth out her darting leaps from topic to topic.