Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out.

You don't have to try to be contemporary. You are already contemporary. What one has in mythology is being evolved all the time. Personally, I think I can do with Greek and Old Norse mythology. For example, I don't think I stand in need of planes or of railways or of cars.

I have always come to life after coming to books.

A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.