Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library.

I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.

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.