Erotic acts are instinctive; they fulfill a role in nature. The idea is familiar, but it is one that contains a paradox: there is nothing more natural than sexual desire; there is nothing less natural than the forms in which it is made manifest and satisfied.

If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.

A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.

Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.

Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.