We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers with their large vocabularies. By the excesses of their language, these young men and women try to hide their sense of inexperience. With maturity the writer becomes more secure in his ideas. He finds his real tone and develops a simple and effective style.

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

I don't think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does.

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.

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.