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

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.

My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.

Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.