I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that's more or less irrelevant. I think I'm a good reader, I'm a good reader in many languages, especially in English, since poetry came to me through the English language, initially through my father's love of Swinburn, of Tennyson, and also of Keats, Shelley and so on - not through my native tongue, not through Spanish. It came to me as a kind of spell. I didn't understand it, but I felt it.

In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." -- Essay: "Kafka and his Precursors

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.