I am quite prepared to die here [in NY]. It doesn't matter at all. I don't know better places, or perhaps if I do I am not prepared to make a move.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

If one's fated to be born in Caesar's Empire, let him live aloof, provincial, by the seashore.

Out of Dostoevsky: Kafka. Out of Tolstoy: Margaret Mitchell. (in conversation, explaining his dislike for Tolstoy)

If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.

Man is what he reads.

I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.