It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.

To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.