I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.

The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

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.

What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?