I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.

Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who loves you.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.