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.

As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

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.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms