When you change the way you look at a thing, the thing itself changes...By mastering feelings, she had come to understand the meaning of discipline and its reward: freedom and power.

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

in the very long run any success devours - and perhaps also corrupts.

Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.