If each of my words were a drop of water, you would see through them and glimpse what I feel: gratitude, acknowledgement.

Poets have the gift to speak for others, Vasko Popa had the very rare quality of hearing the others.

The religion of art, like the religion of politics, was born from the ruins of Christianity. Art inherited from the old religion the power of consecrating things and endowing them with a sort of eternity; museums are our temples, and the objects displayed in them are beyond history. Politics--or more precisely, Revolution--co-opted the other function of religion: changing human beings and society. Art was an asceticism, a spiritual heroism; Revolution was the construction of a universal church.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.

Humankind is never what he is but the self he seeks.

Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.