What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life

Changes are inseparable from democracy. To defend democracy is to defend the possibility of change; in turn, changes alone can strengthen democracy.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

Without democracy freedom is a chimera

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

Loving means getting rid of names.

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.