Both poet and painter want to reach the silence behind the language, the silence within the language. Both painter and poet want their work to shine not only in daylight but (by whatever illusionist magic) from within.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.

I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

Religion and science both profess peace (and the sincerity of the professors is not being doubted), but each always turns out to have a dominant part in any war that is going or contemplated.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.