Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

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.

If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends

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

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.