I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.

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.

He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.

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

In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line