Every part of you that you do not love will regress and become hostile towards you.

I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness.

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

By the time a man is 35 he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life.

I got about half the time I wanted to write poetry. I got about half the time I needed to be a father. So there is something in adulthood that has to do with accepting the half of things, allowing a renunciation of the other half, accepting half a basket instead of a full basket.

I felt a longing to compose a radical or root poem that would speak to what has its back turned to me.

I saw Sophia Loren - the Italian woman with those wonderful cheekbones - in a movie the other day. She must have had 24 face-lifts, and she looks like an alien, as if she weren't from this world at all. Her Italian wrinkles would have been a thousand times more beautiful.