One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against it; it dwells in time - is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long.

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.