[On New York:] ... a city rose before me. It was narrow and tall like a gothic temple, surrounded by water, and ... it suddenly appeared, as if with a slight push it detached itself out of the invisible into the visible.

I think that an anthill is better than a nest ... that in the anthill among a hundred thousand or a million you are freer than in a nest, where all sit around and look at one another, waiting until scientists finally discover ways to make us mind readers. ... the psychology of the nest is loathsome to me, and I always sympathize with one who flees his nest, even if he flees into an anthill, where it may be crowded but one can find solitude - that most natural, most worthy state of man, that precious and intense state of being conscious of the world and of oneself.

Moscow, Rome, London, Paris stay in place. Leningrad and New York float, spreading all their sails, cutting space with their prows, and can disappear, if not in reality, then in the imagination of the poet creating a myth, a mythical tradition on the grounds of his secret experience.

Paris is not a city, it is the image, the symbol of France, its today and yesterday, the reflection of its history, its geography and its hidden essence.

I had learnt to seek intensity — more of life, a concentrated sense of life.

The idea came to me that I was, am, and will be, but perhaps will not become. This did not scare me. There was for me in being an intensity I did not feel in becoming.

How surprisingly alive false ideas are! They even have their own evolution. At first they are highfalutin' 'truths,' then humdrum 'laws,' and finally superstitions.