A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

I have always come to life after coming to books.

For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don't have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don't think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.

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

Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.