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

The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconcievable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle.

My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

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