Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.

Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.