Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?

I have changed as everyone changes: within a permanency.

I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence

If you begin by saying, 'Thou shalt not lie,' there is no longer any possibility of political action.

I was escaping from Nature and at last becoming myself, that Other whom I was aspiring to be in the eyes of others.

I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again.