The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets. ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what?

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

In the country of pain we are each alone.

I find that when I have any appointment, even an afternoon one, it changes the whole quality of time. I feel overcharged. There is no space for what wells up from the subconscious; those dreams and images live in deep still water and simply submerge when the day gets scattered.

For after all we make our faces as we go along.

Unless the gentle inherit the earth, / There will be no earth.