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.

I don't think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does.

We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

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

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.

To bless thine enemy is a good way to satisfy thy vanity.

A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.