Poetry contains love and holds it in high esteem, even though love always humiliates it by using it merely as a soothing after-shave lotion.

Poetry relishes ripe fruit - but ripe is one thing and overripe quite another. That's something poetry doesn't like, so it couldn't care less if I were to fall overripe to the ground.

If anything needs love it is reality, for it is reality that lacks it the most - I doubt that it was ever loved.

Poetry contains love and holds it in high esteem, even though love always humiliates it by using it merely as a soothing after-shave lotion.

All that we are and all that we've ever felt, words have felt it first.

I write very rarely. Only, in fact, when the sheet of paper suffers an existential crisis and threatens, if I don't surrender to it, to bury me alive under its whiteness.

What I try to do is to keep emotion on a tight leash; otherwise, it can never be transubstantiated into poetry.